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Daniel Craig's Blonde Bond Popular Online: Opportunities for Search Marketers
November 23, 2006
We issued a news release today on the most searched for celebrities in the UK. Daniel Craig came in at #2 on the list (behind Faith Brown, contestant on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here). In putting together the release, we noticed that searches for "james bond" had overtaken searches for "borat" and perennial favourite "harry potter" in the week of the release of Casino Royale.
Despite controversy surrounding the "blonde Bond" prior to the film's release, UK internet users are showing a strong appetite for Daniel Craig and Casino Royale.
The share of UK internet searches for "james bond" have been soaring in recent weeks, up nearly seven times in the past four weeks and the share of searches for "casino royale" were up nearly eight times.
The share of UK internet searches for "daniel craig" soared last week, up 3-fold in the past week and up 38-fold in the past four weeks. Using the Hitwise Search Term Suggestion tool, I was able to see that after the term "daniel craig" the top search term that included the actor's name was "daniel craig naked" (likely fuelled by his Ursula Andress moment in the film). Also, searches for Daniel Craig outweighed those for Tom Cruise by a factor of six last week, despite his highly publicised wedding last week.
Movie theatres seem to be missing a trick
In the past four weeks, 17% of searches for "james bond" sent visits to the Sony Pictures website, 15% sent visits to the unofficial James Bond website and 11% sent visits to Wikipedia.org. Similarly, 35% searches for "casino royale" sent visits to the Sony Pictures website, 16% to the Internet Movie Database and 12% sent visits to www.mi6.co.uk.
Movie theatres seem to have done little to capitalise on interest in the latest Bond film through search engines. Search engines accounted for 44% of upstream visits to websites in the Hitwise Entertainment- Movies category last week. However, the cinemas aren't receiving visits from searches for the most popular film online. In the past four weeks, "casino royale" was the top movie related search term sending visits to Movie websites, and the #9 term overall sending visits to the category.
In advance of the film's release, my local UGC cinema was heavily promoting an advance screening and advance ticket sales inside the theatre. With the ability to locally target paid search engine listings, theatres seem to be missing a good opportunity to acquire customers online.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 10:00 AM
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Comments
Daniel, good question - I just went to the Sony Picutres website to see if I could book tickets from there. Seems that you can from the US (you can enter your zip code) but not from the UK, as there is no option to enter a postal code and the search box won't accept letters.
I then clicked the option for the UK site and there was all sorts of flash content (at least looked like it to me), but no option to search for cinemas or book tickets.
Looking at Hitwise data, I can see that the #19 downstream site from SonyPictures.com is Odeon Cinemas, receiving .89% of downstream visits from the Sony Pictures website. Odeon is the only cinema in the top 20. Cineworld is next, getting .45% of Sony Pictures' UK traffic last week.
One other thing to point out - if you click on the Union Jack on the Sony Pictures website, you go to the Sony Pictures UK website. I also looked at clickstream for the UK website, and the story is not much better. There were no cinemas in the top 20 downstream sites from Sony Pictures UK last week. Odeon was the top cinema to receive visits from the site, and received less than half of one percent of site visits from Sony Pictures UK.
Posted by Heather Hopkins | November 23, 2006 03:41 AM
Richard, SORRY! Guess I have Daniel Craig on the brain... From Hitwise data, at least I know I'm not alone! :)
Posted by Heather Hopkins | November 23, 2006 05:07 AM
LOL doesn't sound like your mind is on your work at all.
Thinking a bit too much about 'James' coming out of the sea?
Posted by Richard Hearne | November 23, 2006 11:17 PM
It's a very interesting find. I wonder how many of the studio sites send traffic downstream to individual cinema group sites? I'm not a big film fan, but I also wonder if the major sites like Sony offer facilities to buy tickets at or perhaps find your local cinema?
Searches for 'James Bond' from my location (not UK) offer no PPC ads on Google.
Rgds
(p.s. thanks for the SE report)
Posted by Richard Hearne | November 23, 2006 01:54 AM