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Case Study - Davis Anderson Merchandising
Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King

The holiday season is a crucial time for any retailer, but when your products are also tied to one of the biggest movie releases of the year, it becomes even more important. When Davis-Anderson Merchandising Corp wanted to maximize search marketing returns for the Lord of the Rings™ franchise over the h oliday season they turned to Reprise Media.

Client | Situation | Challenges | Strategy | Results

Client

Davis-Anderson Merchandising Corp is the official merchandising and catalog partner for a
number of large and beloved science-fiction and fantasy brands including HIGHLANDER®,
Marvel Comics® and the Lord of the Rings movie franchise. They develop and sell a wide range of collectible memorabilia such as swords, statues, posters, apparel and DVDs. “We put a lot of pride into the merchandise we create,” said Sharon Jennings, Director of Marketing for Davis-Anderson Merchandising Corp. “Being able to own something representative of the film, TV show or comic adds a level of depth to these amazing mythologies that so many people believe in and feel good about.”

Situation

Davis-Anderson’s relationship with passionate fans has been the key to their success. “Our goal is to make customers feel like part of our family,” said Jennings. The company has built fan lists for each property over the course of years, marketing to them primarily through branded catalogs, web stores and special sales promotions.

In theory, search engine marketing was a logical extension of this strategy, allowing Davis-
Anderson to quickly locate fans as they searched the Web for brands like Xena: Warrior Princess™ or HIGHLANDER. But their early search marketing experiences were not at all
positive.

“We knew we needed to buy search, but we were throwing away thousands of dollars trying to make search engine marketing work.” said Jennings. Davis-Anderson initially had one employee working on SEM part time. “With just one person responsible for search engine marketing, we couldn’t spend a lot of time doing research or building out a keyword list. We just went with our gut.

In October of 2003, Davis-Anderson partnered with Reprise Media to improve their search engine marketing fortunes. According to Jennings, she selected Reprise Media because of their unique perspective on search.

“We knew we were working with experts. Knowing that helped us trust them during the normal ups and downs that come with launching every campaign.”

Davis-Anderson tasked Reprise Media with two main objectives:

• Promote merchandise sales for all properties over the holiday season – especially Lord of the Rings (LOTR). Return of the King (ROTK), the final movie in the series, was set to release in December and was highly anticipated by moviegoers.

• Maintain a 1:5 ratio between media spend and revenue generated.

Challenges

The hype surrounding LOTR: ROTK actually worked against Davis-Anderson – while LOTR searches increased dramatically, most were informational searches about the movie release and were not likely to result in a merchandise sale. Making matters worse, LOTR click prices skyrocketed when other companies like eBay, Amazon, and even New Line itself attempted to cash in on the phenomenon.

Davis-Anderson had to find a way to reach the core audience of LOTR collectors and holiday giftbuyers among a cluttered search marketplace.

Strategy

Volume was readily available thanks to increased interest in LOTR: ROTK, so the focus of this campaign shifted to pre-qualifying those clicks: finding people actively searching for merchandise or collectibles.

To reach these people, we relied on four core tactics:

1. Keyword List Expansion– Reprise Media spidered the Davis-Anderson site, extracting specific product names, and the URLs they were associated with. This process allowed us to quickly build out a comprehensive list of more than 2,500 terms. These terms were organized around four themes or buckets:

2. Tail Terms – This keyword expansion methodology allowed us to focus on building out a large list of what the industry calls “tail terms”: extremely specific terms that typically get few searches during a month. However, when grouped together in large quantities, tail terms can significantly improve a campaign’s efficiency. Because marketers tend to avoid the work associated with buying and managing tail terms, they can often be purchased for market minimums. And because tail terms are highly targeted, they tend to convertvery well.

3. Deep Linking – Once all high-value keywords had been identified and categorized, consideration was given to the correct landing page for each word. For instance, while a person who searches for “Collectible Gollum Bobblehead Doll” is obviously looking for a very specific product (and therefore a specific page), someone searching for “LOTR merchandise” should be sent somewhere that gives them a good sense of all the things Davis-Anderson offers. By matching each keyword with an appropriate landing page, we ensure that searchers will end up where they are most likely to convert to a sale.

4. Negative Matching – After the campaign launched, we analyzed conversion patterns and identified high volume terms that were not converting at a reasonable rate. These terms tended to have broad interpretations. For instance, while the keyword “Lord of the Rings” could pertain to merchandise purchases, many users typing this term wanted movie tickets, movie production information, downloads and fan sites – information that clearly was not available through Davis-Anderson’s catalog.
   
   To cut this waste out, we utilized negative matching – a technique which allows you to pass on certain words when they appear in undesirable configurations. In other words, while we could still own the keyword “Lord of the Rings” (a top driver of campaign volume) we could opt out of placement when a user searched for “Lord of the Rings screensavers.”

Results:

By focusing on pre-qualifying the end user as much as possible, we significantly improved the performance of the Davis-Anderson campaign, consistently meeting and exceeding their performance goals.

• 50%+ of holiday sales generated through search
• Exceeded goal of 1:5 spend-to-revenue ratio

According to Jennings, “Our relationship with Reprise Media is now one of the key components to hitting our marketing objectives.” Orders through Davis-Anderson’s search campaign quickly accounted for half of their overall sales revenue. “Reprise Media added the important steps of research and analysis to our SEM process. As we soon realized, this is a crucial factor in maintaining positioning and improving sales.”

To request additional case studies, or for more information on Reprise Media's search engine marketing services, call us at 1-800-218-9476, or contact a Reprise Media representative today!