One of Ireland’s best-known consumer brands, the Omniplex Cinema Group is now the fastest-growing exhibition circuit across Europe. Since its start in the exhibition business in the 1950s, the family-owned and operated circuit has become a cherished multiplex brand in Ireland and Northern Ireland. With a growing fleet of cinemas in England and Scotland, Omniplex is now entering new markets with a fresh opportunity to introduce itself to new audiences in the British market. In this interview with Paul John Anderson, director of the Omniplex Cinema Group we take a look at the challenges and opportunities of the circuit’s expansion, and the importance of new concepts when it comes to reopening a cinema in a local community.
Omniplex is a very well-established brand in Ireland. How did your family get into the exhibition business?
I’m a third-generation member of the cinema business. My grandfather, Kevin Anderson, started as a distributor in the late 1940s before opening his first cinema on the outskirts of Dublin in the 1950s. Paul Sr., my dad, started working in the family business as a cashier when he was eight years old. My grandfather acquired many single-screen locations throughout Ireland in the ensuing decades, and in the 1980s, my father spearheaded our transition to the multiplex concept. Omniplex, as a brand, was born out of that project in the early 1990s. We now have 44 locations across the U.K. and Ireland, with a total of 356 screens.
You’ve expanded your reach into Great Britain, opening new sites in England and Scotland. How has that experience changed the way you operate the circuit?
We acquired a circuit that had gone into administration in Great Britain. We have a strong presence in Northern Ireland, but this is our first time going into England and Scotland. It gave us a clean slate, an opportunity to reestablish our brand by trying some new things. We now have seven locations—six in England and one in Scotland—and we’ve been putting a lot of resources and effort into renovating these locations. Wigan was the first site we fully renovated, and it’s doing phenomenally well.
One of the concepts we introduced in Wigan is an airstream food truck that we purpose-built for that space. It’s a roadworthy vehicle, seven meters long, that we towed to the cinema and had to dismantle to get it inside the building. We serve 24-inch pizzas—you can buy the full pie or individual slices—and we also serve burgers, along with traditional cinema fare. These are the concepts we’re introducing around our new sites and developments.
It’s so important to distinguish yourself as a unique cinema brand. How has Omniplex approached that challenge?
We’re focused on elevating the experience. How do we make a trip to the cinema better for our customers? In Belfast, we began to innovate under a different brand, Avenue, with elevated food and beverage offerings. We put servers inside the auditorium to deliver orders to our customers’ seats. It’s very different from the normal cinema environment in this part of the world. Even explaining the [dine-in] concept to our customers when they walked through our doors was challenging. The margins are great, but the operating costs are significant. Labor costs, specifically, can become very expensive, so it’s not an easy concept to scale to other locations.
At our Wigan location, it’s simply impossible to do a full food-to-seat offer due to its size. At a 1,000 seats, it’s nearly double the size of our Belfast location. Our solution was to install the Airstream trailer and have the customers come up, place their orders, and take the food back to their seats. We also turned the lobby foyer area into a lounge with comfortable seating, so people coming out of a film can grab a drink or a slice and stay a little while longer with us. People leave the auditorium, see the food truck, see the lounge, and it becomes a different experience. They’re not just looking to leave our theater anymore.
We’ve seen positive results from the concept in its early days, and we’ve rolled out the concept in Birmingham now as well. Up next, we’ll bring it to a site in Sunderland that we’re currently renovating. It’s the sort of thing that helps us stand out in a new market. We’re still in the early stages of implementing expanded food and beverage options across our entire circuit. It is a tough business, very different from traditional cinema exhibition, and it’s not for the faint-hearted. You need to be on the ball and get the right advice if you’re going down that route. You do not want to get into a position where you run afoul of food hygiene and health and safety regulations; you could find yourself in big trouble. Labor and utility costs can wipe out margins pretty quickly if you’re not on top of them.
We’re seeing premium formats over-index at the box office. As you approach these renovations, how do you determine which opportunities to invest in?
We’re passing on more opportunities than we are saying yes to at the current moment. From our point of view, we want to be there for the long term. We want to invest capital into these locations and ensure they connect with customers. We’re investing in the sort of concepts that will help build a more frequent audience for our theaters.
Right now, we see the best opportunities in elevated food and beverage: a pint of beer—stout if you’re in Ireland, ale if you’re in England—with a slice of great pizza. And if you order a beer in our theaters, we’ll pour it in a proper pint glass, not plastic. We don’t compromise on those small details that can help improve the experience.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of our key integral metrics. We grade all our sites on NPS and read all the feedback our customers give us. You need to take everything with a pinch of salt, but it’s a good indicator of the direction you’re heading in. Your loyal customers will be vocal in letting you know whenever you do something wrong.
How do data analytics influence your approach to the business?
We’re massive proponents of using data. If anything, we try not to drown in data because it’s easy to go down a rabbit hole once you begin. Data shows us what’s working well and the areas we should expand on. Having our showtimes and website listed on Google is critical. That’s where the discovery journey begins for our audience, and it funnels them directly into booking with us.
We’ve been operating in England and Scotland for nearly two years. The demographic makeup of those markets is far more multicultural than what we were used to. We see a lot of demand for Indian films, for instance. It has opened our eyes to the potential of that sort of programming in certain locations. In England, for example, we’ve noticed an earlier crowd. We were seeing sell-outs in Birmingham for A Minecraft Movie at 9 a.m. We wouldn’t open cinemas in Ireland or Northern Ireland at that time; no one would show up. That may sound like a minor detail, but it’s informed our opening hours in England, which in turn has a knock-on effect on wages and the cost of operations in the market. These are all lessons we’re learning from our customers: what they respond to at a site level. That feedback informs our approach.
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