It’s the same reason why every “AI” logo looks like a butthole!

We await your contributions to the project (you won’t ever contribute)

Smart designers found the life hack that they can join a highly paid team and work just enough to not get fired.

And this design philosophy has apparently invaded every single corporation on Planet Earth, so I really have no fucking idea where designers are even employed lately.

That’s because they employ you and then force you to do bullshit things

Two things off the top of my head:

• Jellyfin displays ratings from RT (and opencritic maybe?), while Netflix has stopped displaying their own user ratings years ago.

• Jellyfin displays the full cast and crew. When you click an actor, director,… it shows you other media where they appear, even individual episodes. Netflix has none of that.

No. that’s all behind another level.

That may be so, but the popcorn with chemical “pee” has never been what pulls in customers. The movies were always the draw, even if food was the profit. Advertising that food seems short-sighted: who cares if you sell popcorn to a higher percentage of customers but you’re pulling in fewer customers

Yes, that’s true, of course, but you’re not going to sell much if you don’t promote the lineup that actually draws in the customers, would you?

I mean, before, all you had to do was walk past the movie theater to find out what was playing. Like many others, I walk past it very often, and I’ve often spotted a movie that interested me and then come back a few days later to watch it.

Now I have to actively check their website to find out what movies are currently playing, which I don’t do very often.

The theater operators must be fully aware of this—as well as of the fact that the food options they’re now exclusively promoting are so expensive that they’re more likely to deter potential visitors than attract them.

It’s as if an attractive tourist destination were to advertise overpriced tourist-trap restaurants instead of the sights that make the destination appealing in the first place—and that would at least make the inflated prices somewhat understandable.

That should be obvious to any marketer or, for that matter, the management in charge. Customers, of course, aren’t interested in which products yield the highest profit margin for the company, but rather in what they get for their money—after all, no one goes to the movies for the popcorn, but for the films themselves. I’d say anyone who doesn’t understand that is completely out of place in this business. The experience has to be the movie; everything else is just an afterthought.

I usually goto the theater for a specific show, usually buy the ticket online ….

BUT, there are times, such as when I didn’t get a ticket ahead of time and my show is sold out, where I’m in front of the theater deciding whether to go in. It I see an interesting looking movie, I might see that. If the food advertising worked, it would have the opposite of the intended effect “why don’t we goto a restaurant instead ?”

Well, I rarely plan to go to the movies—only on rare occasions, when I know a new movie I want to see is coming out.

I used to walk past the movie theater a lot, though, and see the posters and that’s how I found out about movies I didn’t know anything about or maybe knew of them but forgot. So it happened at least on occasion that I’d call some friends to go see the movie I’d just discovered by walking by the theater - on the weekend or something, not right away, of course.

I never really cared about the food options. Of course, I’d still buy popcorn and stuff, but a discount on it—after which the popcorn is still outrageously expensive—was just as little a motivation for me to go to the movies as any fancy seats or whatever. That’s all well and good, but it’s never been a reason for me to go to the movies. I went because of the movies—which I’d now have to research on my own, something I don’t do.

So: It may well be that I’m the exception. But in any case, I haven’t been to the movies since they replaced the posters with food ads. As I said, that’s simply because I don’t actively look up the lineup and therefore don’t realize that there might be a movie playing that would interest me—I certainly don’t care at all about the current popcorn prices, though.

I guess I’m not the target demographic either then. I don’t think I ever was really, but as a parent of teens, if I do go in, it’s likely to be a family’s worth of tickets.

Maybe you think the rest of us are a minority that doesn’t matter but it seems short sighted to disregard potential customers

Even young people don’t have the movie theater’s app because it’s completely useless. Only people who go to the movies regularly—and are therefore already regular customers—might use such an app. Of course, there are also promotional campaigns by the operators designed to encourage people to download their useless app—but I’m pretty sure most people only do that to get the discount and then delete the app right away.

Young people, in particular, can of course be reached through social media ads and the like, but you don’t seem to realize how expensive that is. I can hardly imagine that a local movie theater—or even a chain with many local locations—could achieve a halfway decent ROAS through this or other online marketing channels.

So in my opinion, it’s simply idiotic to ignore the prime advertising space this movie theater already has—after all, it costs almost nothing to hang a few extra posters on its own building. They could even do that alongside the food ads, which would make optimal use of this free advertising space. But they don’t do that; instead, they’ve removed all the movie posters for a single screen with food ads no one cares about.

I can’t understand the reason for that. If it has to be one or the other—which isn’t necessary at all—I think movie posters are much more effective. I mean, let’s be honest: Which is more useful to potential customers? Knowing which movie is currently playing—something you notice as you walk by, regardless of your age—or an ad for a small discount on tacos or something similar, that are still very expensive even after the discount?

Oh, and just to be clear: Of course, it doesn’t matter at all whether they’re actually posters or screens displaying the movie lineup.

The point is the informational value, which, of course, exists in the real world as well, not just online.

On mobile the icons are about as big as my thumb. On a big screen they are about the size of my thumb held out at arms length. The ratio is basically the same and NO I cannot easily and clearly read every single title on mobile or at a distance, especially the three that I pointed out.