How Disney Does Marketing (They Bought Star Wars and Marvel for $8B!!)

Hello everyone. Today we are going to talk about how Disney does marketing. Now, we are having this come out before one of the major, major movie releases. But before we talk about this, before we talk about this, whatever channel you're coming from, especially if you're coming from YouTube, hit the bell button if you want to get notified. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button too. Subscribe whatever platform you are coming from if you want to grow both professionally and personally. So let us talk about this. Disney is a really interesting one because they are a behemoth. They're not just known for their theme parks. You're sure they started with Mickey Mouse, but they got bigger and bigger and bigger over time. And by the way, the whole Disney idea was rejected countless times. I think Disney was rejected over 300 times. He believed in his concept so much that he was, he was like, you know what, I'm going to keep trying. I'm going to keep trucking. And it went from literally this mouse driving a boat, a steamboat, to what it is today, right? We're talking about Marvel. They own part of Hulu, they own part of Fox, they own ESPN. They are this huge media company. So as we look at my screen over here, we'll talk about a couple of things before we jump into, uh, the SEO portion. And by the way, we talk about 5 things when we look at Disney's marketing. We look at SEO, we look at content, we look at CRO, which is conversion rate optimization. We look at how they do paid media, uh, which is paid advertising, and we look at how they do general marketing too. So basically when we start, uh, when we look at their website over here, Disney, you can see as I was talking about this a little earlier, the sidebar or the top bar, the navigation bar over here shows that you can buy a lot of stuff. You can do Disney Plus, you can do parks and travel. They have a lot of movies, TV. Obviously there's a lot going on, right? And if I hit this button over here, you can see Disney has— my God, they have crafts, recipes, activities. There's a lot of stuff going on here. So you can bet everything that their SEO is going to perform really well. Okay, so I'm going to move over to their SEO portion over here. And let's take a look at Disney.com. And sure, it has a French website up, and we're using Ahrefs, by the way. It's ahrefs.com. Their Ahrefs rank is 1795. So if you're number 1, you are the top website in the world. So even though it says a French domain over here, you can see they rank for 1.7 million keywords and their traffic value is $4.6 million and their domain rating is 89, which is very, very high. Uh, and they have 138,000 backlinks. Referring domains, which is basically different websites linking to you, right? So what that basically means is because their domain authority is so strong, whatever, whatever they tend to publish, especially if it's around Disney or it's around sports or theme parks, whatever, they are gonna rank pretty well because they are such a big brand, right? That's why it's so important to build a brand no matter what size you are. Like, anybody can build a brand nowadays because you can start off with blogging if you're good at blogs. If you're just— if you want to do podcasts, if you're good at audio, you do that. And you can do video too, right? Anybody can build a brand and you can kind of start from the bottom and then get stronger and stronger over time. So when I look at how they're doing from an organic search perspective, it looks like they've been losing some traffic over time. But you know, for them, they don't really make their money off of SEO traffic at the end of the day. And we can see for the— on the United States portion on the right side, Sure, you know, they rank for 882,000 keywords. I'm gonna click on that and we're gonna see what keywords that they rank for. So a lot of it's branded, right? They, you know, they rank for Disney Store, but they also rank for a lot of these brands that they control. So when you think about Captain Marvel, when you think about Black Panther, when you search those, look, Black Panther gets 2 million searches a month. That's a lot. And they rank number 5 for that. They actually own the movie too, so they probably rank number 1 for it on one of their other properties. Captain Marvel, 1.8 million searches a month, and Avengers: Endgame, like Moana. The mothership brand is Disney, but they have so many other sub-brands under it, right? They have so many companies, and then within those companies they have, you know, Moana, they have Black Panther, they have Captain Marvel, right? I've actually worked with a couple people on their SEO team, so their SEOs are really smart, so they know what they're doing, right? The site's structured really well, and then they own a bunch of different domains, and you can cross-link those domains too. So, from an SEO perspective, I would give them an 18 out of 20. Okay. Okay. And the next thing we're going to look at is content. Now content, they knock it out of the park here just because they own so many different properties. If we hit movies, we can see the sheer amount of movies that they could— like Frozen 2 just came out in the theaters. Disney Plus just came out recently, right? The Mandalorian, the show that I watched, all these little subthings of the Baby Yoda is like a sub-brand of The Mandalorian, which is a sub-brand of Star Wars. From a content perspective, Like they're not trying to just write a bunch of blog posts for SEO purposes. Literally what they're doing is they're just making a bunch of pages on the brands and because they are Disney and because they control and those brands get so many searches, they're naturally going to get the, reap the benefits of content, right? So sure, we can look at how they're doing from a video perspective. Okay. They have that covered because literally they are in movie theaters. They have a YouTube channel, they have Disney Plus, they have ESPN Plus too. They have ESPN. ABC as well, right? So we scroll down here and look at all the stuff that's coming out. Black Widow's coming out, Disney's Pixar Soul, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and then there's all these Disney+ originals too, right? Let's look at what they're doing from the bottom over here. Look, top right, in theaters, at home, Disney movies, all movies, movie insiders, movie club. Okay, that's great. So if I click on, let's say I click on Avengers: Endgame over here. Let's see what happens. Think of this as e-commerce at the end of the day. So when we land here, okay, great, they've got great videos and we can see that, okay, there's all the characters over here. Let's see if they actually write. They do write. There's a lot of pictures. Great. I'm looking for things from a, from a written perspective. Okay, so There's not a lot of written stuff going on, but here's the thing. If we look at— you look at the URL slug over here from an SEO perspective, like all they need to do because they're Disney and because this is kind of like an e-commerce thing where you're just putting up your products, which are the movies, movies.disney.com/AvengersEndgame. The URL slug looks perfect. The page looks perfect. It's well designed. At the end of the day, they're kind of like Apple where it's like, we're just gonna put real— like we're gonna put our content right in front of you. It's gonna be nicely designed. And we're just going to rank for it because our domain authority is so strong, right? There's an Avengers Instagram that has 11.7 million followers on it. So again, you have the mothership brand, but you've created so many brands under it. You own all these different companies and then within those companies you have a bunch of these movies and then within the movies you actually have all these characters too. Okay? So like if we type in Disney, Disney has 22 million followers. So now let's look at Twitter. Look, Avengers has 5.3 million followers. I wonder how many Disney has. 6.5 million followers. If you build a brand, if you create content, you control the attention. You can do virtually anything with that attention. So from a content perspective, I'm going to give them a 20 out of 20. What we're going to look at next is how they're spending on paid media. And the funny thing is we actually had a guy graduate from the Single Grain team, the, the ad agency that I have. He actually graduated over to the Disney side too, so he actually works on this stuff now. Hello, Jeff. Disney, you can see how they're trending over time. And by the way, this only looks at— we're using Adbeat over here, and we're only looking at basically Google, YouTube spend. We can't really see Facebook spend. What I want to draw your attention to is the last 180 days, their spending starts to spike, right? So sure, it says that they spent $3.8 million. They probably spent more than that. What you want to do with tools like this is you want to look at the trends. You don't really want to look at Um, the exact dollar value because they don't really have that. But you can see the majority of their spend has been going towards Google and YouTube. Sure, they advertise in billboards, on TV all the time too. So they spend a lot of, a lot of money on advertising. So we can see here in terms of the ad creative, they have been spending, you can see they're spending a lot of money on the new Star Wars movie coming out and then the Disney Plus stuff that they have coming. We can actually see the ads over here. So see all the top ads. So The Lion King, right? That was what they're running a while back. And we can sort by, we can see, oh look, Walt Disney World too, because they have so much stuff going on. Again, if you think about building a company, if you start with the brand first, you create the content, which is exactly what Walt Disney did. He started with Mickey Mouse and the steamboat and it got stronger and stronger. And then, you know, you think about all the princess movies. So he just kept building content, content, content, and then the movies got bigger and bigger and bigger. And it's like, okay, the dream is to build a theme park, right? People are like, oh, theme parks, stupid, right? Yeah. But the dream manifested that you have Disney World, you have Disneyland, you have Disneyland in like Japan, you have Disneyland everywhere around the world, right? You start with the content first, you build the brand, and then because you build the audience, then it's like, okay, now I have enough money that I can do, I can, you know, do the stuff that I actually wanted to do long-term. And then it's like, okay, like how do we, how do we do better? How do we continue to create magical experiences? I don't, I don't think I've ever given a 20 out of 20 on advertising, but I would give them a 20 out of 20 just because they have it so locked down and they know who to hire, right? I mean, literally they picked off one of the people that, that, that worked at Single Grain. Come on, man. So going into general marketing, what I want to show Right now, this is something I don't get to usually talk about, but I love talking about this from a business perspective. If you look at it, it's like okay, our job as Disney is to control the attention, right? To continue to build great experiences, to tell stories to people. We sure we can sell them merchandise. Sure, like we can we can just you know we can get ESPN like that that's you know part of the the attention too, right? So if we look at all these stuff that they bought in 1995, speaking about ESPN. They bought ABC, ESPN, and Capital Cities. Don't know what Capital Cities is, but that was a $19 billion transaction. In 1993, they bought Miramax, the studios, right? $60 million. So they're really good at making content. And I'm going to call out some other ones over here. Um, I'm not going to read everything over here, but I had no idea that they bought the Muppets. They bought the Muppets for $75 million. Pixar, $7.4 billion in 2006. Rob Iger, uh, Steve Jobs, this is before the transaction was going to happen, literally like a couple hours before the transaction was going to go through. Steve Jobs pulls Rob aside, um, or Bob, Bob Iger, and basically said, hey, look, only my wife and you know this, but I have cancer, right? He didn't tell anybody else. Nobody else knew about it. He was like, do you still want to go through with the transaction? They decided to go through the transaction and now Disney owns Pixar, right? But that, that was like a pivotal moment where you have 2 titans kind of, you know, talking to each other and then Steve Jobs being really transparent and being very vulnerable too. Um, literally nobody else knows except for him, his wife, and Bob Iger now, right? Um, and they remained friends until Steve Jobs passed. And here's another big transaction over here. 2009, $4 billion for Marvel. And then also Power Rangers too. Saban Entertainment, Power Rangers. That guy's a billionaire. The guy that came up with Power Rangers. All right. Hulu in 2009 owned 30%, uh, 30% purchase. They did the Fox merger recently in 2019 for $71 billion, but that also increased their stake in Hulu to 60%. So they're a majority owner in Hulu too. And Lucasfilm, $4 billion transaction 2012. Maker Studio, 2014, $500 million. So from a business perspective, Bob Iger, all the moves that he made, he controls the attention for Pixar. He controls the attention for Marvel. Sports too, ESPN, he controls that too. And I mean, he's on his way out, like he's, he's leaving, right? But 21st Century Fox, like when I opened Disney+ and I saw The Simpsons in there, I was like, what is going on? I actually had no idea. He also knew he had, the, the foresight to understand that, look, the streaming war is going on right now with Netflix. Um, they control Hulu, but Netflix, Amazon Prime, everyone's trying to just control more attention. So they had to launch Disney Plus. They knew it was an existential threat to their business to not launch it. And they launched it with fanfare and they created The Mandalorian, which was a really good series, right? If we talk about marketing, marketing is trying to get people to the point of sale. It's also maintaining and holding people's attention and they are kind of the poster child of this. So from a general marketing perspective, I have to give them a 20 out of 20, right? From a conversion perspective, they don't need to try to do too much to try to convert you because look, sometimes it's like you have two ends of the spectrum. It's like you protect the brand and then you try to drive more conversions, right? Their brand is so strong that naturally it makes it way easier to drive those conversions, right? So sure, we can say, yeah, you know, They should add chatbots, they should add, you know, things like that, but they've got it covered from a conversion standpoint. You look at the site, we're just looking at Disney Plus right now. The buy now buttons, sure, it contrasts great. They have the apps, they make it easy for people to navigate around. They're trying to drive subscriptions. They do a good job. So they understand contextually where they need to push it, where they want to push advertising revenue and where they want to drive conversions and then also where they want to protect the brand, right? So if you go to the Disney site, Sure, there's a lot of links in there, but, and then there's some call to actions. Hey, you know, here's what you can buy. Here's where you can learn more about the movie. Um, but you know, conversions perspective, I'm gonna give them an 18 out of 20. All right. So if we total everything up right now, we're going to give them a 96 out of 100, right? Sure. If they had a CRO specialist for each property, they could do a little better. So that's why I'm giving a little wiggle room over there. Um, from an SEO perspective, I'm giving a little wiggle room over there too because Sure, they might have translations going on. Sure, they have different domains. Um, but you know, I'm also docking a little bit because like from a, from a writing, from a content team perspective, it's maybe it's not a priority right now, but they could ramp that up a little bit because they only rank for 800,000 keywords on the main Disney website. I think they could do a little more with that, um, given all the brands that they control at the end of the day. So Disney, I'm going to give them 96 out of 100 and let me know what you think in the comments. Do you think I'm wrong? Do you agree? Do you disagree? Do you think I missed something? Let me know in the comments. If you're coming from YouTube, don't forget to, well, check out the next video over there. Whatever channel you're coming from, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow and it helps you grow too. And we'll see you tomorrow.