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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Movie & TV sequels: search behaviour and the retail gap

July 29, 2008

Yesterday we highlighted the appearance of four Batman-related terms this week’s top 10 fast moving search terms chart. A couple of weeks ago we posted about the relationship between searches for the recently released film Adulthood and its predecessor, Kidulthood. The Adulthood/Kidulthood analysis showed that the release of a new movie led to searches not just for the new film, but also for the earlier part of the series. Taking another look at the Batman search data, we noticed that the same trend was also true with regards to the Dark Knight and Batman Begins. As the table below illustrates, searches for the earlier film experienced a surge last week amongst all the hype for the new movie.

UK Internet searches for Batman Begins the Dark Knight 2005 2006 2007 2008 chart.png

There is an old journalist adage: if the same happens twice it’s a coincidence, but three times is a trend. Following this logic, I tested the theory on a third franchise – the Bourne movies, starring Matt Damon. As you can see from the chart below, searches for The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Ultimatum increased last year thanks to the success of The Bourne Supremacy. This was true both following the initial cinema release in summer and the DVD release around Christmas time.

UK Internet searches for Bourne Identity Supremacy Ultimatum cinema DVD release 2007 2008 chart.png

So what are people looking for when they search for the earlier movie? Judging by the search behaviour for ‘batman begins’, the primary rational is to find a refresher / catch up for the original movies. The top 10 search term suggestions over the last 4 weeks included: ‘batman begins torrent’, ‘watch batman begins online’, ‘watch batman begins’, ‘batman begins wiki’, ‘imdb batman begins’, ‘batman begins stream’ and ‘batman begins imdb’.

The table below, which illustrates the top 10 destinations of people searching for ‘batman’ begins during the 4 weeks ending 26 July 2008, also confirms this trend. Over 70% of searches ended up at either the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) or Wikipedia, while there is only retail site on the list: Amazon.com. And the fact that it is the US rather than the UK version of the retailer shows that traffic came from historical search engine optimisation (SEO), rather than a targeted search marketing campaign.

Websites receiving traffic from batman begins searches IMDB Wikipedia YouTube July 2008 table.png

Television programs now follow a similar pattern to movie franchises, with broadcasters creating a buzz around successive seasons of shows such as the Sopranos and Lost. One recent example is Dexter, the serial killer series that was first shown on the FX channel in the UK, then repeated on the ITV network, and is now in the middle of its second season back on FX. The chart below illustrates the lifecycle of searches for ‘dexter’ by showing which categories of websites people visited after searching for the term.

Destination of UK dexter searches wikipedia FX channel ITV news and media retail 2007 2008 chart.png

As you can see, the initial buzz last summer (1) sent searchers to Education sites (primarily Wikipedia), and this was followed by visits to Entertainment websites (the FX and ITV homepages, plus some traffic to YouTube) as the program gained popularity (2). By the time the second series came round, the hype again sent traffic to Wikipedia, but this time the networks were better positioned to pick up most of the traffic (4).

However, as with the film searches described above, the one industry that failed to capitalize on the buzz was Shopping and Classifieds. Even when the first series was released on DVD earlier this year (3), the marketing campaign drove more traffic to News and Media sites than retailers. It looks like there is a gap in the market. More effective retailer search marketing campaigns should generate more sales of both old and new products when the hype surrounding the latest movie or TV show reaches fever pitch.

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