Ahmed Ramadan, Regional Sales Director, Motivate Val Morgan Cinema AdvertisingWhile premium cinema screens deliver powerful audience engagement year-round, something truly exceptional happens during GCC’s hottest months.
As temperatures soar past 45°C, premium cinema environments dramatically amplify their appeal, creating an unparalleled opportunity to connect with the region’s most valuable consumers when their attention is most focused and receptive.
Beyond impressions: The attention economy
Let’s be honest about what’s happening in advertising today. We’re drowning in impressions but starving for attention.
When was the last time you truly watched a pre-roll ad without reaching for the skip button? How often does your audience scroll past social media ads in milliseconds? Now compare that with cinema – where audiences have not only paid to be present but have committed their undivided attention to the big screen.
According to our campaign measurement platform, a typical summer season (ranging from May-August) packed with major tentpoles delivers on average more than 15 million admissions across our circuit – which is simply put, ‘Super Bowl-like impressions’ week after week. But unlike fragmented channels, cinema delivers these impressions with something increasingly rare: guaranteed attention in a premium environment.
What drives this exceptional attention quality? The psychological context: cinema audiences are in a receptive state, having chosen to invest both time and money in the experience. This isn’t passive consumption – it’s active engagement with content they’ve specifically selected and anticipated.
The premium paradox
Here’s the disconnect that continues to baffle: Brands invest heavily in creating premium products because they understand consumers willingly pay more for quality. Their entire business model depends on this premium positioning.
Yet these same brands – often guided by their and their media agencies’ focus on cost efficiency metrics – hesitate to apply this premium philosophy to their media choices.
Marketers and agencies excel at optimising for CPMs, reach and performance, but sometimes lose sight of the environment where their carefully crafted messages should appear. They market luxury products through discount media channels, creating a fundamental disconnect between brand promise and brand experience.
You wouldn’t showcase your flagship product in a bargain basement environment. So why risk your premium brand’s reputation by prioritising cheap impressions over quality engagement? This is where forward-thinking marketers and agencies are beginning to shift the conversation from efficiency to effectiveness.
Our Val Morgan Brand Fame study settled this debate with hard numbers: cinema increases marketing effectiveness by 20 per cent over digital alone and by 13 per cent over combined TV and digital strategies – transformative impact that fundamentally changes ROI calculations.
The perfect alignment
The GCC climate creates a perfect alignment of factors that savvy marketers are already leveraging:
The scorching temperatures drive affluent audiences indoors, with premium malls becoming social hubs for the region’s most valuable consumers. Unlike Western markets where warm months mean outdoor activities, our reverse seasonal pattern concentrates high-value audiences in climate-controlled environments.
Meanwhile, the film industry schedules its most anticipated releases during this period. This year’s summer lineup – ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,’ ‘F1,’ ‘Jurassic World Rebirth,’ ‘Superman,’ and Arabic productions such as ‘Ahmed w Ahmed’ – creates appointment viewing for exactly the affluent audiences that most brands struggle to reach effectively.
Looking forward: quality as strategy
As we approach summer 2025, the post-pandemic shift toward experiential consumption continues to accelerate. Luxury and experience cinema formats are seeing double-digit growth across the region as audiences seek premium experiences worth leaving home for.
The choice for brands is increasingly clear: continue chasing the vanishing promise of cheap reach, or invest in environments where audience attention isn’t just hoped for – it’s guaranteed.
In today’s fragmented media world, reach will never be your problem. We’re all drowning in available impressions. What matters is creating moments that resonate, connect, and drive real business results.
It’s not about doing more. It’s about doing better. And in the GCC, nothing delivers quality engagement quite like cinema.
By Ahmed Ramadan, Regional Sales Director, Motivate Val Morgan Cinema Advertising
