“L.A. TIMES” ADVERTISES FOR MOVIE ADVERTISERS

In an unmistakable effort to win back some of the advertising dollars from movie studios that it has lost in recent years, the Los Angeles Times did a little advertising of its own on Friday, the day on which the studios have historically promoted their latest releases most aggressively. In a full-page ad in its Calendar section, the Times cited a recent study by MarketCast, an entertainment industry research firm and a corporate sibling of Daily Variety, indicating that the average reader of the Calendar section saw 69 percent more movies in theaters than non-readers. According to the study, “80 percent of Calendar readers say the section influences their moviegoing decisions.” The study also determined that “Calendar readers are mainstream moviegoers.” That would seem to fly in the face of other studies that have indicated that the median age of newspaper readers is 50 and that most of the under-25-year-old crowd that movies primarily attract never pick up a newspaper. Again citing the MarketCast study, the Times observed that the average Calendar reader goes to 14 movies per year, while the average non-reader goes to 8.3 movies per year. Those figures would also seem to conflict with others that indicate that the average teenager goes to the movies 35-50 times per year.