Can Art House Theaters Use AI-Driven Data Models to Reach a More Targeted Audience?

It’s a perennial question that movie theaters — especially local art house theaters — have dealt with long before the Internet: how do you engage with your audience? How do you get customers in the doors and into your seats and keep them coming back? And if they’re not, do they not like your theater or the titles you’re showing, or do they not know you’re there or how to find it?

For Laemme Theatres president Greg Laemmle and filmmaker and actor Raphael Sbarge, that exact question has followed them as they’ve tried to grow the reach of their video podcast series “Inside the Arthouse,” a film interview show that hosts conversations with the filmmakers behind the smaller movies playing in Laemmle’s own theaters and others like it around the country. The idea is to provide a means for art house patrons to cut through the noise and learn about the movies they’re actually interested in.

But “Inside the Arthouse” faces the same challenge. Over two years, the podcast has grown to half a million subscribers on YouTube and over 5 million views. But they too want to know how can they get their show itself to cut through the noise of everything else on YouTube; reach the people who genuinely care about independent film and art house theaters; and in turn help the films, the filmmakers, and their business reach the audience that matters most. It’s important, because these are movies that people need to be made aware of through wide-ranging means, and they’re not the types of movies that will generally end up on a streamer down the line.

“The studios with their broader films can go back to their playbook, but indies can’t, and we need to find some ways to inform the audience about what films are available and worth seeing,” Laemmle told IndieWire. “Some things have stepped up into that void, but they’re not necessarily for what was considered that traditional art house audience. That older audience that really relied on press coverage is not going on Letterboxd. Not yet. We want to try and understand, how can we reach that audience and get them excited to come back and see movies?”

IndieWire can reveal that “Inside the Arthouse” has partnered with Chronicle, an AI-driven data company, in the hopes of better targeting and optimizing the “Inside the Arthouse” audience and taking its reach and influence to the next level. Chronicle uses AI models to simulate audiences, analyze viewer behaviors and interest, push it more effectively to people on social, and then tailor that data so Laemmle and Sbarge can make decisions about how best to market and grow their podcast.

Laemmle and Sbarge have been working with Chronicle for two months now, and they said the uptick in engagement once Chronicle got under the hood happened “literally almost overnight.” They went beyond looking at views to instead analyzing who is spending the most time watching their show and where that audience is coming from, and they’ve leaned on Chronicle to get their show in front of those folks more efficiently than had they tried to do their own ads or merch sales to get the word out about “Inside the Arthouse.”

“What has happened with Chronicle is that they have been able to, with whatever their technology is, they have been able to find the audience and then take it directly to them,” Sbarge said. “That’s why our watch hours are up. That’s why our watch time per episode is up. That’s why all the metrics of engagement have gone up, and because in this case we’re not selling T-shirts or books. What we’re actually trying to do is actually promote these extraordinary artists’ work. There’s a mission behind this.”

Chronicle was built on the idea of discovery and that, whether it’s a YouTube podcast or a tentpole blockbuster, it doesn’t matter how great your product is if your audience never sees it. They’ve observed how troubled Hollywood movie marketing can be, throwing tens of millions of dollars at a movie’s P&A budget to watch it flop and find that some people still didn’t even know it exists. It’s a challenge that obviously exists on a micro scale as well for art house movies and trying to find an audience that’s passionate about them.

Founded by tech executive Aaron Sisto and former Fox and Bento Box exec Scott Greenberg, Chronicle starts by running a general model of similar content to “Inside the Arthouse” on YouTube in order to identify demographic trends, preferences for consuming, the works. It then builds a specific AI model trained on the show itself to simulate audiences and get a more specific sense of who is watching any why. Then rather than “buying a bunch of ads and just shotgunning it,” as Greenberg explained, they can micro target clips of the show to specific users and feed their recommendation engines on social media.

They found that, while there’s a huge general audience of as many as 111 million+ people who enjoy independent film that they’re not completely tapped into, there’s still pockets of people they didn’t expect whom they can still push their content out to. For instance, they found that their show had a remarkably even split among age groups, not a predominantly older crowd, as some might expect. Their audience leans slightly more toward women than men, and is mainly in North America but with key pockets in Europe. They even found an alignment between people who follow Japanese anime sharing interest in some of the same deep dive filmmaking crafts discussions “Inside the Arthouse” generally explores.

“There’s a conventional wisdom of, if you don’t have a certain amount of ad dollars, you can’t buy awareness. Well, we think we can help solve that,” Greenberg said. “We can reduce the barrier to entry to awareness. If you know what your audience is, you’re not spraying and praying; you’re more of a sniper getting in front of them. So give me my 1,000 true fans versus 100,000 meh fans. That’s where you can make virality less lightning in a bottle versus inevitability.”

All of it is informing how long episodes of “Inside the Arthouse” should be, who else they should book as a guest, and how they can tap into more niche audiences for things like anime or documentaries. It’s even starting to shape how Laemmle is thinking about potential live events in his venues for the podcast, what sponsors to go after, and how it might be one day syndicated to cable or a specific streamer.

The good news is he’s seeing the enthusiasm and growth post-COVID back in art houses as well, with he says even young audiences embracing repertory screenings, event cinema, and newer art house voices. But there’s still filmmakers and films he grew up with that he wants in his theaters as well.

“I want to get that audience back. We’re fighting. We’re perhaps fighting a different battle, or we’re fighting a battle on two fronts,” Laemmle said. “We’re certainly appreciating that the younger audience is there and programming for them, but we want all quadrants back, and we need all quadrants back to some extent. I don’t want to see a certain type of film disappear or become less relevant on North American screens.”