the frequency a kenny chung blog

If 2015 was any indication, people still care about movies. Total domestic gross was $11.1 billion. The top three movies were all record-breaking sequels (Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, Jurassic World, and The Avengers: Age of Ultron). And despite declining viewership, the 88th Academy Awards still drew over 34 million sets of eyeballs.

Movies vs. Netflix

Although the effect on the movie industry hasn’t been as radical as it was for TV, new modes of entertainment delivery (e.g. Netflix) are changing the ways that consumers view media and its role in everyday life.

Consider the following chart that shows the average movie gross vs. Netflix subscriptions:

Average movie gross vs. Netflix Subscriptions

Source: Misix

It’s a loose correlation at best, but what’s clear is that fewer people are paying for movie tickets. Of course, that chart doesn’t include the phenomenon that was Star Wars, but the yearly trendline still stands. With advanced technology, the home can very well be a pleasant movie-going experience (or I suppose, more accurately, a movie-staying one).

With the always-on, instant gratification prospect of streaming, it only makes sense that the studios are always playing catchup. It’s a fine balancing act between determining how soon to release movies on home media. Of course, streaming services are also delayed in getting the latest releases, but the difference in waiting an extra week with the benefit of not having to go out to a big box store to pick up the latest movie sure is enticing. And with the benefit of a gigantic back catalog of TV shows and movies, consumers can easily keep themselves entertained in the interim.

Theater to DVD wait times

A chart showing decreasing time between theater releases to DVD releases from this reddit thread 3 years ago.

Mapping Oscar Search Trends to Consumption Habits

The Academy Awards, however, present us with a unique opportunity to identify how users are searching for movies in real time. It stands to reason that the award-winners will garner the highest levels of interest, with the general public wanting to watch said movies.

The first step, then, is to figure out what qualifiers or search terms people usually append to movie titles. Based on this set of keywords associated with 2016 Oscar winners, we can chart the data thusly:

Movie Consumption Methods by Search Volume

With the exception of “DVD”, the distribution of searches greatly skews toward illegal (or potentially illegal) viewing methods.

Using Google Trends, we can see that the hourly trends generally show that around the point of impact (Oscar winners being announced), there is a significant spike in searches in all of these types of searches. However, as time goes on, the searches that stay on top are typically explicitly illicit (e.g. Torrent) or vaguely so (e.g. Download).

Spotlight

Best Picture
Best Original Screenplay

The Revenant

Best Director
Best Actor in a Leading Role
Best Cinematography

Room

Best Actress

The Danish Girl

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Bridge of Spies

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Inside Out

Best Animated Feature Film

The Big Short

Best Adapted Screenplay

Ex Machina

Best Visual Effects

Mad Max: Fury Road

Best Film Editing
Best Costume Design
Best Production Design
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Best Sound Editing
Best Sound Mixing

What does this mean for media distributors?

The obvious takeaway is that during awards ceremonies, movie studios or streaming services should bid on movie names + modifiers (budget permitting) since that may very well be the highest traffic and sales opportunity for home media (this likely also applies to music awards shows). The studios/services should customize their messaging to match the event, and also optimize all aspects of their organic presence as well. Ranking well for all on-brand “download” and “DVD” terms is a no-brainer, as well as for shopping, video and image engines.

On the surface, it might make sense to add “torrent” as a negatives in paid campaigns, but if people aren’t looking to pay, then they won’t click on your ad anyway. And you run the possibility of being able to capture clicks if there are no viable illegal viewing options available. For example, if you’re a service like Amazon Prime that does several-day rentals, then tout the benefits of the low cost and the convenience. Give people a reason to pay a few dollars for an authentic copy, because any friction is going to drive users to the simplest option, which is typically the most illegal.

SEJ Summit NYC 2015

I was invited to the 2015 SEJSummit in NYC hosted by Searchmetrics. It was unique in that they advertised zero vendor pitches, just content. And they definitely delivered on that promise. The day was jam-packed with 8 speakers, talking about a wide variety of topics ranging from content strategy to user tracking to mobile SEO. Each presentation was meant to have 3 Takeaways, presented at the beginning and recapped at the end. Below are my notes and liveTweets of the presentations, separated by presentation topic:

“Thinking Outside of the Text Box: 6 Ways to Increase the Life of Your Content” with Kelsey Jones (Search Engine Journal)

We kicked off the day with some fresh content marketing ideas. Kelsey’s presentation mainly focused on ways to leverage existing content and either spin it or repurpose it into different formats or social networks. Some of the tips were things we should all know (guest blog, syndicate content, etc.), but there were a lot of good ideas for other channels. Slideshare, for example, was mentioned a lot as a new way to present existing content to a different audience.

Podcasts surprisingly make up almost 26% of all audio consumed (that’s across all media devices including cars), which is an astounding number. Sometimes, it’s worth altering the format of your information since people prefer different consumption behaviors (e.g. the Oregon DMV offers an audio version of their driving manual). You can also turn long-form written content into short-form podcasts. One example was Frommer’s (known for their travel guides) creating short bite-sized podcast episodes focusing on very specific locations within a country.

For videos, there were also a few ideas. For example, NewEgg creates videos for breaking news stories, which is often quicker than writing them up. This allows them to be first to publish, and then they turn the content into longer, written posts.

Lastly, one metric Kelsey touched upon was that syndicating content elsewhere can lead to an 180% increase in email subscribers. The logic here is that if a new audience sees your content, they’ll seek out the author or company who puts it out (assuming the content is worthwhile).


“The Social Future” with Peter Shankman (Geek Factory Inc.)

Peter Shankman’s presentation was more free-form, with no deck. It was focused on customer service in the digital world, and if there was one major takeaway, it was that you don’t need to be the best at customer service; you only need to be “several levels above crap.” The point being most companies are terrible at social media and online service, so you only need to be better than they are.

One recurring theme of the summit was about the usefulness of social media metrics, or lack thereof. Peter postulated that the idea of big brands chasing social media Follows, Friends, Fans and Likes is going away because it doesn’t follow natural human behavior, and they aren’t useful to report on. People want to interact with people they know, and not necessarily with brands. He also mentioned that Yelp was dead (or soon to be) because other social networks are more useful for recommendations. I took issue with this one, because like I’ve written about two years ago, Yelp is a social network.

Peter provided his four rules for better customer communications. Rule #1 was to be transparent. It’s inevitable that screwups will happen. Brands should own up to them, rather than trying to sweep them under the rug. Using a real life example, he said we should aspire to be like Eliot Spitzer (he apologized and is now accepted back in the mainstream) and not to be Anthony Weiner (who tried desperately for damage control). [sic] in my Tweet of Weiner’s name, by the way. A great quote from Peter was that “the best lover is a former hater”, meaning if you can turn someone around, they will become your greatest brand advocate.

Rule #2 is to find out how your audience wants to receive information and deliver it to them that way. He told a story about a company that gave thank you gifts in the form of a coffee table book, but through a simple survey, he helped them figure out that the majority of customers preferred online content. So with that simple change, they not only saved money on printing books, but also increased their rate of donations.

Rule #3 is to focus on brevity. Brands have an average of 2.7 seconds to reach their audience. After that, their attention will be gone. Peter advised anyone involved with corporate communications to take an improv class, as it will positively affect the way they speak, and help you get to the point.

Rule #4 is to talk to people even when you don’t need anything. Sometimes it just pays to be top of mind. Peter told us the story of Barry Diller, a former CEO of Paramount during the 70s and 80s. One of his keys to success was to call people just to speak to them and ask if they needed help with anything, rather than just calling when he needed a favor. In turn, under his watch, Paramount became the most successful motion picture house of its time.


“3 Red Hot Social Marketing Hacks To Crush in 2015” with Daniel Morrison (aimClear)

Usually at marketing conferences, there are only one or two presentations that have super clearly defined actionable takeaways. Luckily, SEJSummit had three of them (in a row!). The first was from Daniel Morrison, who was a quant through and through. I took the most notes from his presentation, which focused on leveraging psychographics to enrich your remarketing data/lists.

Daniel outlined three steps for improving your data pool:

  • Inject psychographic data into your audience list
  • Cookie them with retargeting pixels (as first party data)
  • Nurture/convert them with remarketing/RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads).

In order to create the best personas, Daniel recommended layering in active intent filters (the types of people specifically looking to do something, which directly/indirectly ties to a conversion for your brand) as well as taking a dual root approach (creating target segments based on multiple criteria, such as behavior and financial qualifiers).

He also recommended tagging campaign URLs with UTM codes so they can feed into remarketing list rules. He provided three real-world examples of successful campaigns. The first was a tire reseller who increased sales by 22% by bidding higher for users who had previously visited the homepage. The second was a vacation tour company that increased conversation rates by 300% by bidding on broad “gift” terms on people who had previously made a purchase. And the last was a telecom company (with TV, voice and internet services) who decreased CPO by 66% by serving custom ad copy based on the services that the users subscribed to.

There was also talk of setting frequency caps based on the type of service and the typical life cycle, but I’ll touch upon that at the end of the next recap.


“Harnessing the Awesome Power of Identity-Based PPC Marketing” with Larry Kim (WordStream)

Larry Kim is the founder of WordStream, and I’ve had the fortune of listening in on one of his webinars before. His presentation at SEJSummit was full of hyperbole, but his conviction to and expertise in the topic was something to behold. According to Larry, identity-based PPC marketing was the biggest evolution in both paid search and email marketing.

Simply put, identity-based marketing (or people-based marketing) is the ability to target specific users by some sort of unique identifier (email address, phone number, Twitter handle, etc.). By targeting groups of curated individuals, you avoid some of the pitfalls of traditional PPC and email marketing efforts. Firstly, there are no inventory constraints as there are with email blasts, and it is harder to unsubscribe because targeted paid ads are just about everywhere (not sure if this is good or bad for the consumer…). Secondly, it makes it easier to increase your potential target pools while maintaining quality, as you can clone your audience lists using tools like Facebook’s lookalike audiences.

Larry also brought up some real-world examples of his. In one instance, he blogged about a topic on a Friday afternoon and didn’t expect much press coverage. So he ran a Twitter campaign aimed at target influencers, and it was picked up by a large publication shortly thereafter. Another example was for a conference at which he was presenting. He created an audience list based on people in the location of the event within the relevant industry.

During the Q&A session, an audience member asked Larry and Daniel about frequency caps. Larry advised that marketers be aggressive with caps as they are rarely met. And in cases where ad fatigue occurs (which means fewer clicks), the corollary is that the conversion rate for users who actually click through actually increases.


“Big Brands, Mobile SEO and You” with John Shehata (Conde Nast)

I briefly worked with John when he was my ABC News client toward the end of my time at Morpheus Media. He’s an opinionated and clever guy, and his presentation was focused on optimizing websites for mobile. In it, he dispelled some misconceptions about mobile best practices. The major one was that responsive design is not always the most mobile-friendly solution for large sites. Google did not outright say that responsive is the best; they only stated that responsive is better than a strictly desktop experience. The most common alternative is a dedicated mobile site (e.g. m-dot), which leads to all sorts of organizational content issues. The third way is dynamic serving, which displays different HTML/CSS based on user agent. The main benefit is page load speed. John stated that 80-90% of site speed issues are on the front-end, and now that load time is a mobile ranking factor, it makes the most sense to start there. Another stat he quoted was to aim for a 1 second page load for all mobile content above the fold. If optimized rendering can be utilized to allow that content to load first, it is preferable.

John also mentioned that Google will start penalizing app download interstitials (on-page popups on mobile sites that ask the prompt users to download the site’s app instead). The best practice here is to use banners instead. For the future, it’s not outside the realm of possibility (and may actually be very likely) that Google’s stance will extend to all sorts of mobile interstitials and popups, regardless of intent.

One last useful bit of information was about the purpose of googlebot-mobile. It is not the standard mobile crawler. Instead, it is the crawler that Google uses for “feature phones”, which were the precursor to smartphones (think slide or flip phones with limited internet browsers). The standard Googlebot is that one that crawls for mobile.


“SEO Reporting in the Enterprise: Information is Power” with AJ Mihalic (Ayima)

Admittedly, this is the point of the summit where my attention was split between the presentations and some urgent client work, so my notes became a bit sparse. AJ of Ayima spoke about SEO reporting for enterprise clients. He championed graphical interpretations of data, rather than tabular formats. He also recommended utilizing some sort of “EKG” dashboard in order to monitor site health preemptively, instead of waiting for Google Search Console/Webmaster Tools to identify issues because at that point, the problem will have existed for days, if not weeks. In order to do this, AJ mentioned a few methods of early detection. One would be to look at the status codes that your website is returning. If an increase in 404s occurs, it may reflect a redirect problem. Another would be to look at a server log of which pages Googlebot is crawling. Your tech team is your friend for all of these things.

AJ also echoed an approach that I’d heard before at the last SEO meetup I attended, which was to optimize for metrics that will get your clients (or their bosses) promoted. Those are likely the most effective KPIs for your agency work.


“Increasing Your Content IQ” with Jordan Koene (Searchmetrics)

Jordan spoke about how to choose content topics, leverage competitive insights, and about the importance of content recall. On content topics: brands and agencies often have tunnel vision when it comes to keywords. Brands should embrace the image that they’ve cultivated instead of trying to redefine themselves in a way that runs counter to how searchers view them. The websites that brands view as competitors may not be the same ones that are actual competitors. One example was Toyota. Their search competitor for a lot of terms isn’t GM, it’s local Toyota dealerships. Once they added “Official” to all of their site page titles, SEO traffic increased 20%.

Content recall is also important. The topics or themes to which users associate your brand are hard to shake, and may not exactly sync up with your goals. For example, eBay has tried to become a marketplace for luxury goods, but users continue to associate the site with a secondhand garage sale image. One random and interesting stat – there are more used/broken phones of any single iPhone model for sale on eBay than listings for all new phones combined.


“Content Marketing: Success by Design” with Eric Enge (Stone Temple Consulting)

Eric’s presentation was mainly about measuring for SEO successes. Without quantification of goals, any content creation is worthless. Eric’s recipe for content marketing success is to build you reputation, grow visibility, grow your audience, and get links.

By measuring your own successes and comparing to your competitors, it becomes easier to identify which areas need improvement in order to overtake them in organic rankings. For example, a site that recently outranked yours may have recently acquired a high authority link. Your goal should be to receive a link of similar equity, if not more. Rankings are incremental; you should be trying to leapfrog over the listing directly above you, rather than aiming for #1 every time. Eric recommended using Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and ahrefs for backlink reporting.

September 24th, 2013
according to

Communication scholars are sure to be familiar with Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase “The medium is the message”. In lay terms, McLuhan proposed that how you convey a message to your audience is just as important as the message itself. For instance, McLuhan believed that television viewers were less objective and less literate than readers of print publications. He states this at around the 4 minute mark of this video:

In the same decade that McLuhan first published this phrase, America experienced its first televised Presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon. At this point, not everyone had a television set, so many families were still listening to the debate via radio broadcast. It was widely reported that radio listeners believed Nixon to have won the first debate, whereas TV viewers believed Kennedy won. The difference? Nixon was recovering from an illness and as a result, was pale and sweaty.

Also take for instance the introduction of movie theater advertising from around the same era. At this point, most people have heard tales of Coke’s supposedly subliminal movie advertising (the results of which were later found to be dubious). These days, pre-movie commercials are also accompanied by the sneaky-as-ever phenomenon known as product placement, a practice which has also received considerable backlash. Contrast these two types of movie advertising – one is expected (the time before movies start has always been reserved for advertising snacks and other movies), while the other can appear naturally if done right (consider all movie scenes that take place in Times Square). People receive these types of advertising much differently according to expectations. Studies have shown that product placement plays an effective role in cuing brand recognition.

Utilizing Digital Marketing Mediums to your Advantage

It’s been over half a century since McLuhan shared his pervasive line of wisdom with the world, but it’s as true as ever. With the ever-changing landscape of technology and ways to reach consumers, brands must be careful with how they advertise and take advantage of the channels available to them.

Twenty years ago, search engine marketing was not really a viable industry. Nowadays, brands can bid on individual keywords or groups of them. Search is a pull medium rather than a push medium (in theory, brand messaging can be presented only to qualified users who express an interest in that brand’s product offerings via their search queries). So you craft the messaging of your paid search ads differently from your TV or display ads, which are both mostly forms of push advertising. Within search, you can customize your messaging even further. For example, if someone searches for your brand name, you can tell them about a specific sale you’re having (fall sale, 20% off clearance items, etc.). But if someone is searching for a general product that you sell, you could use your ad to tell them about the benefits of shopping your site instead of going to the competitors (free shipping, widest selection, lowest prices, etc.). The possibilities are as endless as the permutations of words consumers type into that all-important Google search box.

And ten years ago, we didn’t have Twitter or Facebook. The only real ways for consumers to communicate directly with brands were via telephone, email or in-store with other customer representatives. Now, I can post a Tweet to complain about Time Warner Cable service or to commend Chex Mix for being delicious (both things I’ve done in the past year).

Those who work in brand management know the importance of keeping messages on-brand. But on the flip side, the people you reach on Twitter on a Friday night are likely not the same people you would reach with a TV ad placement during a noon soap opera. Granted, that’s an extreme example, but it still hammers home the point that it makes sense to craft your messaging according to who will be receiving it. The barriers to entry for social media marketing are so low that it doesn’t make sense for most brands to be uninvolved (regulated industries excluded). Tweets can be sent out as soon as they’re thought up (and approved).

Super Bowl ad junkies will remember this amazing Tweet from Oreo last year following the in-stadium blackout that occurred. That image was created and the Tweet was approved to hit the web before the lights came back on in New Orleans. To date, it’s received over 15,000 Retweets. Utilizing your channels properly can be a powerful vehicle.

On the other hand, bad social media strategies like Kenneth Cole’s can lead to a backlash. To call it a strategy isn’t too much of a stretch, as Cole himself has mentioned that his Tweets are meant to “provoke a dialogue“. It’s just a strategy that associates negative feelings toward the brand.

Then there’s also this amazing parody Burlington Coat Factory Twitter account, with such gems as this:

Apparently, a lot of people were fooled into thinking this was their official account. That doesn’t bode well for their actual social media team and its official Twitter account.

5 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Messaging

So how do you customize your marketing for the social web? Research. Tons of it. Here are 5 quick tips to get you started:

1) Know your audience. Not all social media channels cater to the same audience. Pinterest skews heavily female. Reddit is more techy than Facebook. Keep facts like this in mind when deciding what to share and where to share it.
2) Tag your campaigns! Use your visitor analytics to see what types of content resonate with which audiences. Do Twitter followers tend to stay longer on articles with lots of images? Are email newsletter visitors more likely to read long-form content? Do Facebook users share your content more if they read it before they leave the office?
3) Maintain Brand Messaging. Connect all of your advertising in some way. For example, in support of a single campaign, it may make sense to include the same hashtag across TV, social, and print. For some brands, having a discordant messaging works for them (consider Geico’s multitude of mascots).
4) Don’t be afraid to experiment! Short of creating offensive Tweets for the heck of it, you can test out different formats for your social strategy. Again, the lifespan of most Tweets and Facebook posts are short, so you can accumulate a lot of data in a short amount of time. Test things like the background color of your images, the URL shortener you use, the pronouns you use, etc.
5) Interact with your (potential) consumers! The best way to avoid negative PR or to encourage brand loyalty is to show customers that you’re listening. Responding to valid online complaints, Retweeting compliments, and even Liking Facebook comments can be enough to show followers that people are listening. Airlines (which get truckloads of complaints) are actually some of the best at responding to criticisms. Whether they do anything worthwhile with that information is another issue altogether…

At the end of the day, happy consumers have the propensity to be as passionate about your brand as you are. So perform the due diligence, get your feet wet, and good luck!

January 5th, 2012
according to

I’ll admit that the title of this blog post is a bit sensationalist, but walk down this path with me and maybe it will be justified enough to make sense. Alternative names for this blog post? “How to Sell SEO to a Non-Believer” or “Wagering on SEO” or maybe even “SEO is next to Godliness”. Okay, not that last one.

The inspiration for this post is the argument proposed by the French philosopher/mathematician Blaise Pascal regarding the existence of God. His viewpoint, dubbed Pascal’s Wager, stated (without taking sides in the argument) that whether or not God exists, it benefits a person to live virtuously such that when that person dies, he or she will have done a life of good as a result of the potential existence of God, regardless of whether or not there’s a Heaven or anything afterwards. The possibility of being a good person and not going to Heaven are considerably outweighed by the consequences of being an immoral person your whole life and then finding out that God exists. The probability math comes out to roughly 3 out of 4 times, it’s better to live your life as if you believed in God.

I’m sure I’ve made some mistakes in interpreting Pascal’s Wager, but the general framework can be applied to many non-theistic topics, such as global warming. Take this comic for example:

Global warming Climate Summit comic
This comic is a personal favorite regarding the global warming “debate”

This all relates back to SEO, I promise. Hopefully also with practical implications.

So let’s say you have to sell SEO to a client or business. You can invoke some form of Pascal’s Wager to do so, as unintuitive as it may seem. The best argument for why SEO is a useful service worth paying for isn’t in dollar signs, rankings, or clickthrough rate percentages. It’s in the alternative. How much does it cost for that company to not have optimized pages and to not rank well on the first page for relevant terms? That’s the gambit. Sure, there are checks and P&Ls involved, but at the end of the day, if you shell out X amount of dollars for good SEO, it’s worth it 75% of the time. And that’s an ROI any marketer can get behind.

This reminds me of a party I attended recently where a stranger asked what I did for a living. I replied with the generic “Internet marketing” to some awkward indifference. I then added, “you know, God’s work.” That at least got a chuckle. Little did he know I wasn’t entirely joking.

March 1st, 2011
according to

This past week, NPR’s On The Media dedicated the latter half of their show talking about Search Engine Optimization. There’s some good basic stuff in there, putting all of the recent bombshells and ramifications into lay terms. Available in audio form and transcripts.

The segments:

How to Cheat Google
David Segal, the author of the NYT article outing JCPenney, explains some of the problems with the algorithm and how Google punished JCP and other sites.

Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Web Spam Team
Interview with Matt Cutts about how Google engineers operate and how they respond to user questions, etc. Pretty standard stuff from Cutts.

How Search Engines are Changing Journalism
How online news outlets are using SEO to their advantage, including the HuffPo model.

Steven Rosenbaum and the Curation Nation
Interview with the CEO of Magnify.net who says that user recommendations may become more important than search engines when it comes to sharing content.

The Formula for a Most-Emailed Story
Professors looked at months’ worth of NYT articles and came up with some factors that correlate to high levels of sharing (including the quantification of “awe”).

Link to stream/download the full 02.25.11 Episode of On The Media.

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