SAWA Convention 2007 - Releases 3 New Reports
4th June 2007

SAWA Affirms Digital Progress of Cinema Advertising at Cannes Lions Festival 2007

15th June 2007 - Cannes, South of France. Cinema advertising is once again the centre of attention at this year's Cannes Lions festival thanks to a raft of initiatives by the Screen Advertising World Association (SAWA). New technologies on and off the big screen have in the past year cemented Cinema Advertising's position as the advertising medium with the highest impact and recall rate. In addition to holding its own two-day event, SAWA will host a session in the Palais on Monday, 18th June 2007 on innovations and new campaign tactics and are releasing a newly commissioned report titled "Alternative Revenue Streams other than the Big Screen", as well as publishing the update of the Digital Standards and Recommendations Document for Cinema Advertising. This builds on several successful SAWA-Cannes Lions events in the past couple of years.

While Cinema Advertising was first to embrace Digital for the Cinema Screens in a major way, the Hollywood studios are now pushing and supporting the high end digitization of Cinemas for feature films. In this situation, with nearly 10 per cent of US screens already playing the latest blockbusters in digital, SAWA has evolved its Standards and Recommendations document, launched at the Cannes Lions in 2005. The new document takes into account the DCI specifications and use of the JPEG2000 image encoding format. SAWA is also releasing a Digital Sound Standard Manual as well, which was commissioned by Digital Audio and Cinema experts Dolby Laboratories. Both documents will be available to SAWA members at the Convention.

"We are proud that the original SAWA Digital Standards and Recommendations Document for the Deployment of Cinema Advertising document has been so widely embraced by the industry as the quality benchmark for Digital Advertising presentations in cinemas," comments Cheryl Wannell, General Manager of SAWA. "As the films that play after the adverts are increasingly screened in Digital too, we are now ensuring that we have the same level of excellence for our Client.s product." The original document formed the baseline for several Digital Screen Advertising efforts, including the largest network in Europe; SF Media's 400+ strong digital screens across Sweden, as well as several others.

SAWA at Cannes Lions on the Monday
The Seminar at 15:00 on Monday 18th June 2007 in the Est?rel theatre will feature a showcase of the best innovative off-screen advertising campaigns and promotions in the cinema environment. Amongst those speaking and presenting will be:
.     Marisa Torrani (Popcorn Advertising Sales, South Africa) on Xbox Games,
.     Florian Weischer (Werbe Weischer, Germany) on the Nivea Smell Campaign,
.     Matthias Luschinger (Cinecom, Switzerland) on the Microsoft Vista Campaign
.     Tor Steiner Olsen (CAPA, Norway) on Stargame, the Interactive Film Quiz Game

All of these initiatives have had significant impact in their native markets and SAWA is throwing open the doors for everyone at Cannes Lions to come and learn from the leading experts where the sessions will include hands on demonstrations. As each of the events that SAWA has staged at Cannes Lions in the past two years were full to the last seat and late comers were turned away, this year.s Seminar is expected to follow suit.

For further information on the SAWA Convention contact; Cheryl Wannell, General Manager, SAWA Secretariat, Sydney, Australia on cwannell@pacific.net.au or by phone on +44 (0) 771 737 7110.