Our church community has a strong foundation of faith, and we have made it our mission to continue to reach out to share God’s Word with others in new and innovative ways. One way that we did this was through the commercial we produced and ran at our local Emagine movie theater last year, which was a great evangelization tool. We are committed to continuing our efforts to reach a culture that has become increasingly distracted from being in a daily relationship with God and want to meet them where they are.
After a successful first year of this ad campaign, parish leadership has agreed to launch a new campaign beginning August 17, 2018 at Emagine Macomb at 23 Mile and Hayes. The commercial will run for a year and focus on our Sunday Night Mass, “A Mass for the busy Catholic.” This new Mass has already seen tremendous growth, and we want to continue to let Catholics know that we are here for them with their busy schedules.
Emagine Macomb houses 9 screens that show approximately 5 movies each per day and sees 10k-15k visitors each week. What a great place to send our message and invitation! 77% of Americans age 12+ attend at least one movie per year and 20% of Americans ages 12+ attend monthly. 70% of those moviegoers are under the age of 50. This presents a tremendous opportunity for us to reach those who would not otherwise be reached by our message.
Though ads and commercials exist in all forms of media, the movies are the one place that a viewer cannot /skip/ the commercial. Today, we can skip commercials on TV and in online content such as YouTube. We are quick to toss out ads that come in the mail often without even reading them. However, at the movies, audiences give the screen their attention and are usually in a good mood on a date or with family and friends.
We wrote a commercial script that presented the situation that “life is busy,” and showcased three scenarios (using our own parishioners!):
- A family with travel sports
- A professional working hard on the weekends
- A group of people who go out and may not feel like getting up on Sunday morning
We then tell the viewers that we have them covered with Sunday Mass, tell them a little bit about the church, and give them a simple call to action to learn more about us: text “Mass” to 474747.
While we have ways in place to try to measure the results or “success” of the commercial, we know that this is more about continuing to get the word out that St. Isidore Church is here and a great place to worship, a form of evangelization similar to why we sell St. Isidore apparel.
Here is our 2018-19 ad campaign: