Universal Pictures Home Entertainment (UPHE) has named the search firm Vizion interactive marketing agency of record after the two worked together for nearly a year, promoting titles such as "Jason Bourne," "The Secret Life of Pets," "The Girl on the Train," "Captain Fantastic," "Mr. Right," "Ride Along 2," and "Straight Outta Compton."
The partnership marks UPHE's foray into working with an agency that focuses on search advertising and marketing. "They didn’t specifically have a 'search' agency, but their other media agency had included search on occasion," said Mark Jackson, Vizion Interactive’s founder and CEO.
Initial tests between Vizion and Universal began March 2016. The partnership intends to bring more attention to UPHE's titles across online marketing media, as well as to track and attribute spend and growth back to sales.
UPHE's "The Secret Life of Pets" made it to the list of top-selling home titles in the U.S. last year, according to the U.S. entertainment trade body DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group.
The hope is that UPHE will reach more consumers at home through online advertising as the amount spend on home entertainment in the U.S. continues to rise. Total U.S. home entertainment spending topped $18 billion in 2016, according DEG.
Vizion attributes success partly to developing a method to measure engagement metrics and the ability to track different forms of conversion for a variety of movie titles and distribution partners such as Amazon, iTunes, Best Buy, Target, and others. The results was a phased approach to search marketing.
"Measurements extended into user experience metrics beyond what has been, historically, a focus for them," Jackson said. "This was done to provide deeper understanding of the value and efficiency of search."
This "beyond-click-measurement" method allowed Vizion to demonstrate or improve efficiencies in the amount spent by 17%. It became all about showing better performance as well as more efficiently allocating budgets.
When asked if Vizion ties the search campaigns into other media, such as display, video, or television, Jackson said the efforts include working with other agencies to ensure that timing is in sync and supports all forms of promotion.
The idea to help Universal understand more about usability on its Web site, which is already being incorporated into longer-term plans for the creation of a better user interface, analytics, search engine optimization, and paid search advertising performance.
On Tuesday, Vizion was named by Google as a Premier Partner. Only about 3% of Google's agency partners achieve Premier status, per Jackson. Premier Partners are required to maintain additional certification and they receive more personalized support from Google.
In December, the B2B ratings and reviews firm Clutch rated Vizion one of the top Dallas SEO firms of 2016, along with Thrive Internet Marketing, WrightIMC, Wired SEO, Vertical Nerve, Enilon, and RUNNER Agency.
In addition to search and analytics, the agency also offers email marketing and social-media services.