SNAPSHOT
The Problem: How do you convince cinema operators in Vietnam, Egypt, and rural Africa to trust a random British startup with their ad revenue… without looking like a “Nigerian Prince” email scam?
The Fix: A full-scale “Email Infrastructure & Psychology” overhaul that turned a frozen cold domain into a relationship-building machine.
The Result: From the spam folder to $3 Million ARR in signed partnerships. (Yes, really.)
ONCE UPON A TIME…
Meet “Love Cinemas.”
A plucky underdog agency trying to act as the middleman between advertisers and the silver screen.
The problem?
The “Big Boys” of advertising already had the Western markets locked down tighter than a drum. Love Cinemas needed an angle. A wedge. An opening.
So they looked where nobody else was looking:
The Third World.
We’re talking small, independent cinemas in Thailand… Vietnam… Egypt… and across Africa. Markets with language barriers, low trust, and scepticism sky-high enough to touch the stratosphere.
They had a list of 15,000 decision-makers. Gold dust, right?
Well… not quite.
Because Love Cinemas was committing the cardinal sin of outreach: They were blasting cold, generic emails from a brand-new domain to all 15,000 people.
Result? CRICKETS.
Actually, worse than crickets. They were getting flagged as spam faster than you can say “Unsubscribe.” They were burning their list—and their reputation—to the ground.
HELP WAS AT HAND
When they came to The Legacy Room, they were desperate. They had the deals, they had the advertisers, but they couldn’t get a cinema operator to open an email, let alone sign a contract.
So we performed open-heart surgery on their entire funnel.
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The “Trust-First” Warm-Up:
First, we slapped their hands away from the “Send” button. We fixed their DNS records (the boring technical stuff that stops Google from treating you like a criminal) and implemented a slow-burn domain warm-up strategy.
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The “Anti-Scam” Messaging:
Here is the psychology part. When you email a business in a low-trust market, you don’t pitch. You prove. We rewrote their copy to acknowledge the scepticism upfront. We stripped away the corporate jargon and replaced it with raw, human authenticity that bridged the language gap, and we even split tested emails using their native language (thanks, ChatGPT)
THE DAY WAS SAVED
The silence… broke.
First, a trickle of replies from Thailand. Then a flood from Egypt. Then deals signing in Vietnam. By fixing the technical deliverability AND the psychological messaging, we moved them from the “Junk” folder to the “Priority” inbox.
The numbers were frankly ludicrous:
Over £3,000,000 in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) generated from commission-based partnerships.
AND THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER
Today, Love Cinemas are the dominant cinema advertising middleman in the developing world.
And as for The Legacy Room?
We proved that with the right combination of technical know-how and psychological copywriting… you can sell ice to Eskimos (or cinema ads to Egypt).
If your cold outreach is leaving you out in the cold… get in touch. We’ll bring the heat.
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