Lionsgate has partnered with Tiicker, a pioneering platform for cultivating shareholder loyalty, to offer retail investors discounts and gifts around the studio’s film and TV brands. The goal is to turn individual fans of its franchises into stockholders.
The studio is the first Hollywood partner of the Detroit-based firm that has programs with Amazon, Carnival, Ford, GM, Whirlpool and others.
Lionsgate vice chair Michael Burns says it currently has fewer than 10,000 retail shareholders owning well under 10% of the company. The shareholder base is largely institutional, as with most publicly traded companies — aside from meme stocks like AMC Entertainment where individual stockholders mostly replaced institutions. Like many stocks in the media space, Lionsgate’s could use a boost.
Perks, tiered to various levels of stock ownership, offered though the Tiicker platform include a 50% discount for a year’s streaming subscription to Starz; discounts on movie tickets in partnership with Atom Tickets; limited-edition Lionsgate commemorative shareholder certificates featuring movies and television series; discounts on a range of Lionsgate “events, experiences and merchandise”; and giveaways and sweepstakes for movie premieres or for shareholders to host hometown screenings.
The Tiicker, created in 2020, lets shareholders redeem perks after creating an account that’s connected to their brokerage account, verifying stock ownership.
Retail investors can communicate and interact directly on Tiicker, which does much of the outreach, offering articles and insights to help investors discover publicly traded companies, a Brand Search Engine to find public companies behind their favorite brands, and a collection of Shareholder Store e-commerce sites.
The fandom is there for franchises from Hunger Games and Twilight to Dirty Dancing, Expendables, Ghosts, Saw, Power, Now You See Me and Mad Men. The official trailer for John Wick: Chapter 4 that dropped Nov. 10 has more than 21 million views on YouTube.
“This is a way for us to communicate directly with our shareholders, to increase our shareholder base and to have shareholders who are consumers of our product,” said Burns, who shepherded the project with Jenefer Brown, Lionsgate EVP & Head of Global Products & Experiences.
One element of the program, stock certificates, have largely been replaced in the Internet age but are making a bit of a comeback, like vinyl. Old stock certificates from the Walt Disney Company, Playboy or old railroads can sell on e-Bay for hundreds of dollars.
“I think there are a lot of people who love Twilight. Why wouldn’t they want to own [a certificate that is] artwork from the first movie?” said Burns. Certificates from the subsequent films in the franchise could create a set.
Jeff Lambert, Tiicker founder and CEO, called Lionsgate’s Shareholder Rewards program “the most comprehensive suite of perks and experiences every introduced by a public company.”
“Individual shareholders are loyal and want to connect with the companies they own,” he said. “We’re thrilled to debut our first partnership with a world-class Hollywood film and television studio and their tens of millions of subscribers and fans.”
The program goes live today. It comes as the company continues to pursue a split of the business by mostly likely spinning off the studio into a separate public company.
