Planning Dinner and a Movie Just Got Easier
August 19, 2010 by Marc Fishman
Comcast Digital Entertainment, Fandango, and “On the Border” Mexican Grill & Cantina have teamed-up to offer a one stop solution for planning the complete night out. Buy movie tickets online for the nearest theater and locate the closet “On the Border” restaurant all by way of CDE’s “Dinner and a Movie” ad unit.
The ad unit features one module for returning showtimes and another for returning “On the Border” restaurant locations. Modules in the ad unit are generated on-the-fly by pulling data from the Fandango API. This is the same technology used to power CDE’s previously released “Showtimes & Ticketing Widget”. The data returned in both modules is real-time and geo-specific based on the user’s zip code. This means a multitude of local showtimes to choose from and all the information needed to contact and locate the nearest “On the Border” restaurant.
This new ad unit is an IAB standard 300×600 and is currently running on Movies.com and CDE affiliate sites like Screen Rant, Film Drunk, and MovieWeb. It is now available within our suite of products and we look forward to future partnerships with restaurants looking to offer a great dining experience to our hungry user base of entertainment enthusiasts.
Fandango Showtimes Page Live on Screen Rant
July 29, 2010 by jlouwerens
Comcast Digital Entertainment recently launched a Fandango branded/powered showtimes page on Screen Rant. As you can see, the page is in Screen Rant’s main nav so it will generate a pretty decent level of impressions (Screen Rant is approximately 800k monthly Comscore unique visitors). We will be rolling similar pages out across the CDE affiliate network in the coming weeks.
The benefits of the pages are
- Branding and traffic/ticket sales for Fandango (with affiliate revenue sharing for Screen Rant)
- Brand lift for the affiliates – when new advertisers are evaluating the affiliate sites they will have a more premium feel.
- More valuable showtimes inventory to sell to endemic advertisers
- A better user experience for the Screen Rant community
The modules on the page are generated on-the-fly by pulling data from the Fandango APIs and caching the data on Akamai. The Showtimes and the Nearest Theaters widgets are pulling zip codes from a geolocation web-service.
So go ahead and see the Screen Rant Showtimes page for yourself at http://screenrant.com/showtimes.
CDE Brings “Movie News Now” to Millions of Entertainment Enthusiasts
May 28, 2010 by Marc Fishman
To help Sprint align its new 4G phone with with the hottest summer movies, Comcast Digital Entertainment has created a custom ad unit featuring the most current entertainment news. Four up-to-the minute headlines with engaging thumbnails are pulled from CDE’s premium publishers and include movie news, reviews, links to trailers, and top movie star news. The content is different and fresh with every new re-load, with a click to any link will bring users to the full story.
This IAB standard 300×600 unit is sponsored by Sprint to promote the hot summer release of the new HTC EVO™ 4G. The ad can be seen now at Fandango.com, Movies.com, and any of CDE’s affiliate sites like ScreenRant and Film Drunk. Early response to this ad unit and it’s content has been very positive. Due to the fresh nature of the headlines, users have been highly engaged with very impressive click-through rates.
This new CDE product is now available to all of our partners. It can be utilized by any brand advertiser to leverage the best original content from our enthusiast driven web-sites – making your brand part of the conversation in the exciting world of movies and entertainment.
Tags: Entertainment, Fandango, movie news, Movies.com, Sprint
Study: Online Ad Effectiveness Higher on Premium Content Sites
May 11, 2010 by Steve Raymond
Context matters! A new report released today by the Online Publishers Association (OPA) found that advertising effectiveness scores on quality, original content sites such as those found in the Comcast Digital Entertainment portfolio as represented by OPA members, were numerically higher than on the Web, portals or ad networks.
These data confirm the CDE strategy of only working with hand-picked, premium content sites in the context of integrated partnerships. The findings show that ads on original content sites consistently had significant effectiveness in raising awareness, creating message association, generating brand favorability and driving purchase intent over portals, ad networks and the overall MarketNorms ® average. In addition:
- Ad networks (Examples include Advertising.com, Broadband Enterprises, Glam Media, Gorilla Nation, Specific Media, ValueClick and Vibrant Media) were shown to provide advertisers with the smallest change across ad effectiveness metrics.
- The most popular ad sizes – medium rectangles, leaderboards and wide skyscrapers – perform significantly better on OPA sites than MarketNorms® on most metrics
- Video ad impact on premium content sites represented by OPA members was greater than the MarketNorms average, and had the greatest impact on purchase intent and awareness metrics
- Consumers are more involved with interactive ads on premium content-focused sites evidenced by their significantly higher awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent
See the full press release here .and download the full report here
CDE Launches Fandango Showtimes & Ticketing Widget
April 23, 2010 by Marc Fishman
Comcast Digital Entertainment has launched a Fandango powered showtimes and ticketing widget this week to promote Iron Man 2 on behalf of our partners at Paramount Pictures. The widget automatically displays movie showtimes for neighborhood theaters based upon zip code of the end user. Any showtime link can be followed for ticket purchases on Fandango. The widget was engineered on top of the data APIs the Fandango team uses to power their site as well as our iPhone and Blackberry mobile apps.
The widget serves within an IAB standard 300×600 unit and is now an official CDE product available to all of our partners. Our studio partners can use it to promote their film openings, and other brands can use the widget to align themselves with a fun night out at the movies. Visit one of our publishers to see the widget to purchase advanced tickets for Iron Man 2 before it sells out!
Tags: Blackberry, Fandango, iPhone, Iron Man 2, Paramount Pictures, showtimes, tickets