Our biennial Vista Group Conference was held last week, and what a conference it was! The three day event in New Zealand was packed with product updates and new technological developments delivered to 160 customers by the many companies of the Vista Group. Movio unveiled 'Movie Insights', the first of our data-driven Movio Cinema modules, gave a glimpse into our product vision and committed roadmap, released the latest news on Movio Media and shared insights from our Movio Experts. For those of you that couldn’t find a seat in our packed-out conference rooms, we’ve recapped the best bits of Movio’s time at #VistaGroupCon 2017.

Data-driven innovation

Movio founders Will Palmer and Peter Beguely were the first to take the stage on opening day, bringing with them the product vision and committed roadmap for Movio Cinema. A key focus of ours is to empower our customers by providing them with the relevant tools to reach their audience, and our strategic and timely development plan to feature-proof Movio products is an important element of that.

The two founders introduced a range of new modules and features scheduled for release that customers - and us! - are really excited about. Data-driven innovation is the core of our business, which is why our latest Movie Insights and Audience Insights modules, reporting overhaul, and Mobile Connect module (push notifications) are such an exciting step.

"With Movio Cinema, we can reach our customers across all access points with one touch. It's changed the way we work from a broad-brush approach, to a granular one."
Kelly Hawkins, Vice President of Loyalty, Regal Entertainment Group

Our Movio Cinema Product Owner, Ryan Scott, took to the stage alongside Vista’s Dave Smith to discuss how the two companies work together. This was a particularly interesting presentation for those clients looking to understand how Movio’s products can integrate seamlessly with the Vista Solutions they already use. Highlights of the talk included automated communications, core segmentation, and different campaign examples to execute through the use of both programs, depending on a member’s behavior.

The true value of member data

Although it’s been available to the US market for the past two years, there are a lot of exciting innovations coming for Movio Media. Movio Expert Matthew Liebmann discussed these in his presentation on the importance of comprehensive customer data and how Movio Media can help pinpoint and target specific audiences that go beyond basic segmentation. He shared tips on how to gather specific information about your audiences to help personalize all touch points, and also provided examples of Movio Media successes (our campaigns are typically about 50 percent higher than the industry standard).

"Movio is super easy to use, and very intuitive. It's a game changer when it comes to analysing data."
Erlend Bøksle, Marketing Director, Nordisk Film Cinemas

Maximizing your ROI

Along with their success stories, Movio Experts Sarah Lewthwaite and Matthew Liebmann brought along a wealth of loyalty marketing knowledge to share with our guests. From customer incentives to successful email strategies to going further than traditional demographics, they provided a large number of tangible, actionable tasks to elevate loyalty programs. A key takeaway of their presentations was the loyalty workflow; value proposition, capturing appropriate data, segmenting and targeting, maximizing effectiveness and increasing profits.

In Sarah Lewthwaite’s presentation, she talked about loyalty program profitability and how ‘gut feel’ is no longer an accurate measure for campaign implementation. The data within Movio Cinema provides specific, measurable customer information that can surprise you as often as it can support your hypotheses. As moviegoer behavior evolves, we’re seeing more diversity in audiences than we could have ever imagined, and relying on cliches to motivate campaign strategy is no longer a justifiable budget exercise!

The overall theme of our Vista Group Conference presentations was very much in line with our standpoint of being never satisfied. We are always striving for improvement and innovation in our products, broader understanding of our market and additional channels of customer data collection, and we encourage our clients to do the same.

Business aside, we also had a wonderful opportunity to spend time with many of our clients at the ‘Friends of Movio’ party on the second evening of the conference. This party was the first time we were able to host a group of our partners from all across the globe in our base city of Auckland, which made it even more memorable! We hope our guests enjoyed the night as much as we did.

Want more? We’ll be covering the conference topics in more detail in coming blog posts, and you can check out exactly how the journey went with the ‘#VistaGroupCon’ hashtag on Twitter!