Thirteen Markets, Three Continents, One Supply Chain

In 2005 we co-founded Cinema Scene as a theatrical marketing company. Within a few years it was running studio promotions across thirteen markets on three continents. In 2011 we sold that business as a standalone company and used the moment to build something else inside the same four walls.

Almost nobody knows about the first part, which is a shame, because it is the engagement that taught me the most.

The thesis was the easy part

Studios running global campaigns needed execution in market. A promotion conceived in Los Angeles had to land in Bangkok, Dublin, Mexico City, and Stockholm with the right product, on the right date, cleared through the right local relationships. The regional studio offices owned those campaigns and had limited capacity to execute them.

That is a clean thesis and you could write it on a napkin. Every competitor could see the same opportunity.

The thesis was never the hard part. The hard part was being able to deliver it.

What we actually had to build

Regional commercial partners

You cannot sell into a market you do not live in. Every one of those thirteen markets required a commercial partner who carried two things at once: the selling, and the local studio relationship.

That second part is what people underestimate. A regional studio office in Germany does not care what your head office in the United States agreed to. They have their own release calendar, their own marketing budget, their own approval chain, and their own view of who is reliable. The partner who already has standing in that room is worth more than any amount of corporate alignment.

We negotiated licensing agreements directly with regional offices of Walt Disney, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures International, and DreamWorks Animation. Each one was its own negotiation, in its own market, on its own terms.

In-region manufacturing

This was the decision the business turned on.

The obvious approach is to produce promotional product in one place and ship it. It is simpler to manage and it looks cheaper on a spreadsheet. It also does not work. Freight cost on physical product across three continents eats the margin. Customs clearance introduces a variable you cannot control into a campaign with a fixed release date. A promotion that arrives two weeks after the film opens is worth nothing at all.

So we built manufacturing inside each market. Product made locally, to the studio's specification, cleared locally, delivered on a local timeline. That removed freight and customs from the model entirely and made the campaign dates achievable.

It also took years, and it is the reason the business was defensible. A competitor could copy the thesis in an afternoon. Copying a vendor network across thirteen countries is a different proposition.

The lesson, stated plainly

Revenue that cannot be fulfilled is not revenue. It is a forecast.

This is the fourth step of the method I run on every engagement, and it is the one most growth plans leave out. Strategy decks end at the channel. The capability gets named, the buyer gets identified, the entry path gets drawn, and then the plan assumes delivery is somebody else's problem.

Delivery is where the margin lives and where the timelines break. In this business it was manufacturing and customs. In a software business it is the compliance workflow a guild requires before it will let you near a screener. In a services business it is the vendor who cannot staff the third market. The name changes. The failure mode does not.

What happened next

We sold the international business as a standalone company in 2011. That same year we started building a digital out-of-home media network in the cinema lobbies the parent company already occupied, which produced thirty-five million dollars over its first five years. Cinema Scene itself was sold in 2016.

Two businesses built inside one company, and two exits. The second one would not have happened without the first, and not because of the proceeds. It happened because by then we knew how to look at a company and ask what it already owned that nobody was selling.