Dunkin’ Donuts took the gloves off in its battle against rival Starbucks with the October 21 launch of its “Dunkin Beat Starbucks” campaign featuring a national blind taste test where Dunkin’ coffee was preferred over Starbucks. Has the campaign resonated with coffee drinkers?

*Daily reach is the number of people that visit a website on a given day
as a percentage of all U.S. Internet users online that day.

• 45,516 people visited the dedicated microsite dunkinbeatstarbucks.com the week ending October 25
• Weekly traffic to dunkindonuts.com jumped 61% to more than 196,000 the week after the initial media launch
• The daily reach of dunkindonuts.com saw a temporary increase on October 26 & 27

So, will the battles for coffee drinkers continue? Starbucks has already launched a new media campaign with a TV ad during Saturday Night Live offering free coffee to voters on Election Day. Daily reach to Starbucks.com the day before the Election skyrocketed. Coincidence? Not likely.

Below is some advice from one coffee drinker.

Taste matters. So does staying top of mind with coffee enthusiasts. Creative marketing campaigns that break through the media clutter and reach coffee enthusiasts regardless of their brand preference may help to grow the overall market, even if only temporarily. Consumers who visited both Dunkin Donuts’ and Starbucks’ sites last week jumped to more than 485,000, its highest level since mid-September.

Stay true to your brand promise. Make sure your brand strikes a chord with the coffee drinkers that are core to the brand’s identity. Go beyond demographic-inspired or comparison pricing messages to see how the behavior of your coffee drinkers differs from your rival’s. Find out what we’re searching for, our attitudes, and where we spend time online versus (hint – I have been known to spend time on hsus.org versus either Dunkin’ Donuts or Starbucks despite my love for and daily cup of, coffee!). How would you reach and engage me?

The online channel, originally considered a threat to the music and movie industries, has become an increasingly important distribution channel. Over the last several years, we’ve seen more and more industry-sanctioned content download sites. Services like eMusic, Napster (the legal version), Rhapsody, and iTunes have grown their inventories and membership. At the same time, companies that used to peddle hard copies of their respective media are turning to the online retailers.

I’m a big fan of the hit AMC TV show “Mad Men,” but I’m not a cable subscriber, so I usually turn to the internet to stay up to speed. Sure, I could pay $2.99 to download last week’s episode from iTunes. Or I could use one of the many P2P sites and download the same content for free. I know there are many who would prefer the free route, but I think that it’s much easier to download from iTunes than it is to search high and low across the internet for P2P content. When do users use P2P and when do they use industry sanctioned sites?

To learn more about how consumers use paid content together with free content, I divided online media sites into two categories: industry-sanctioned and P2P. For the industry-sanctioned category I looked at paid services like Rhapsody, eMusic, Napster, Amazon, plus free streaming sites like Pandora, last.fm, and Shoutcast. In the P2P category I looked at 13 Torrent sites (free content delivery) and Limewire.

The chart below shows how traffic to P2P sites compares to traffic to industry sanctioned sites.

• Traffic to industry sanctioned sites climbed 60% since August 2007, while traffic to P2P sites has been holding steady over the same period
• Still, P2P sites’ get more visitors, with an average volume was roughly 8.5 million unique visitors per month, compared to only 6.3 million on industry sanctioned sites

Why the growing interest in industry sanctioned sites? It might be the convenience factor. Content can be tough to find or of sub-par quality when downloaded with P2P. For only $0.99, you could hop on iTunes and download a tough to find song instantly, rather than sifting through junk and spam on a P2P site.

If convenience is driving media sales on industry sanctioned sites, these sites could continue to grow and succeed. P2P sites are likely not going anywhere though, and even as the music and movie industries find success with new distribution models, they will need to find creative ways to coexist with free content.

One of the small conveniences of the internet that I really enjoy is being able to order movie tickets online. Over the summer, I noticed that almost whatever site I visited to learn about a movie and look at show times eventually took me to one of two places to buy tickets: fandango.com or movietickets.com.

It seemed like I saw both pretty frequently, so I took a look at compete.com to see how competitive the sites really are. These metrics helped me learn more about the competition between Fandango and MovieTickets, but it also makes an important point about consumer behavior trends when it comes to the movie business.

First of all, I was surprised to see that not only does Fandango get more traffic, but it’s actually widened the gap with MovieTickets this summer to about 4.5 million visitors in July.

Overall traffic is a powerful metric, but it doesn’t tell the full story. Repeat business is also an important measure, so I took a look at the average monthly visits per person to these sites.

Fandango has also been ahead in visits per person since June 2007. In the last year, the average Fandango user visited about 1.6 times a month, while the average MovieTickets user visited about 1.4 times a month.

So Fandango has both more people coming to the site, and people coming slightly more often.

But I think the real story is in the overall trend we’re seeing with these sites. More people are buying movie tickets online and we see higher seasonal (summer and winter holidays) peaks over time. This suggests that buying tickets online is becoming a more widespread practice among consumers. Still, the number of times people go to these sites has been fairly flat, about 1.5 visits a month, on average.

Although more customers and more repeat business are both potential growth strategies, these data suggest that the real opportunity for Fandango and MovieTickets might be to grow by increasing volume of users and making the practice of ordering online more mainstream rather than trying to get customers to go see more shows.

I’ll see you at the movies.

With summer starting to wind down my dreams of being on safari in South America are starting to occupy my mind more and more. This reminded me of a remarkable video I saw on YouTube several months ago; in traditional viral fashion (Hey did you see this video yet?? Spam spam spam!). The video showcases an epic battle of nature caught on tape (perfect for a show on Fox) of the daily struggles of a socially outgoing buffalo calf.

The Battle at Kruger was so popular that it actually was made into a National Geographic special, which first aired on May 11th, 2008. This can certainly explain the third spike in web surfers looking for the video online but I am personally chalking the first two up to internet fascination at its finest. Here is a breakout showing the number of people who viewed the video since it was first posted. You will also notice a line that shows how much time the average person watched the video but we’ll get to that soon.

As the story goes, a cute buffalo calf, on a clear sunny day and without a care in the world, wandered away from its herd and down a seemingly harmless dirt path seconds before it was ambushed by… Actually, I think it is more of an adolescent buffalo who is struggling to find its identity through rebellion. Anyway, it gets attacked by a pride of lionesses. Helpless and without any facial or other body piercings for the lionesses the choke on, the buffalo looks like it’s in pretty bad shape but it won’t go down without a fight…

I realize I just left you hanging and you are probably saying, “Wait wait wait, what happened next??” But in actuality over 60% of the people who watched the video already tuned out by this point. Over the observed period the average person stopped watching somewhere around the massive tug of war, 3 minutes before the day was saved and a full 5 minutes before the end of the video, where if you actually made it that far you were nearing the exciting part of the ‘slow clap.’ Yes it’s a long video, 8 minutes and 23 seconds, which is well above the average American attention span, but come on people this video is one of a kind. Below is the breakout in minutes of how long people spent actually watching the video.

Realizing the success of this video and the buzz (of Serengeti mosquitoes) surrounding it, minds quickly went work trying to tap this potential cash “buffalo” and the domain battleatkruger.com was born. There you could be, among the tens of thousands who have gone to learn more about the video’s back-story, buy high quality pictures of the event and most importantly get your hands on some very swanky merchandise. I am personally rocking the pink “Team Buffalo” shirt in my daily rotation and I encourage you all to buy soon though, Christmas is coming and these are limited production!

Since its release on 17th July, The Dark Knight has managed to stay at the top of the box-office chart for four straight weeks. Looking at its overwhelming box-office success, I became curious about its popularity in the online world. I compared the search trend for the Dark Knight against the other two summer blockbusters, Iron Man and Indiana Jones – The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, during their release weeks and 2 weeks before and after their releases.

As shown in the graph, we do not find any concrete evidence that the box-office rush for The Dark Knight in fact translated into any substantial, extended advantage in online search. Indiana Jones was able to create more curiosity among people than The Dark Knight or Iron man before release. After release, the search trend for the Dark Knight took off, surpassing the other movies by a huge margin, but it was only for a short time. Two weeks after release, search volume for The Dark Knight was on par with Indiana Jones. It’s also interesting to note that although Iron Man was able to become a box-office winner (to date it has earned almost $2M more than Indiana Jones), its search, except one week after release, remained below Indiana Jones during all the surrounding weeks.

It’s logical to assume that people tend to search for a movie around the release time, and eventually their curiosity declines as their interest shifts to the other new/upcoming releases. The trend, what we see here is consistent with this norm.

Given that all three of these movies had different selling points, I was interested to see what was driving the search for the movies. The following table shows the top six search keywords surrounding the movies. It is not surprising that for all three, the top search keyword is about the movie itself. However, the interesting thing to note here is that whereas for Iron Man and Indiana Jones, movie-inspired games appeared among the top six terms, for The Dark Knight the buzz-worthy terms were Joker and IMAX. Moreover, for both Iron man and The Dark Knight, the possibility of sequels seemed to become a great source of curiosity among the audiences, whereas for the Indiana Jones movie-related accessories became a source of interest for many.

I was also interested to see if the recent popularity of Indiana Jones and The Dark Knight also spilled over into renewed interest in their previous installments. Before the release week, the search for Batman Begins trailed behind only Raiders of the Lost Ark, and after release it surpassed not only all three previous Indiana Jones movies individually, but the search trend combining the three Indiana Jones movies too. No doubt, the tremendous success of The Dark Knight generated new interest in Batman Begins - in fact, I am ready to watch it again.

Since its premier, The Dark Knight has been breaking all sorts of records. Now that it has become the third biggest movie ever, what remains to be seen is if it can claim the crown for top grosser of all time. I think it has the capability to replace Titanic at the number one position, but it probably won’t be able to break the other record currently held by also Titanic, which is to remain at number one for 15 consecutive weeks. (Tidbit: Did you know that Christian Bale was almost cast for the role of Jack Dawson in Titanic?) However, given the next week’s release lineup, it can very well stay on the top for at least one more week. Personally, I would like to see it become the top grosser of all time, rather than some mindless movie which became a box-office hit based on success of its predecessors only (eg: Pirates of the Caribbean : At World’s End ), but a lot of it depends on how the playing field will look like in the coming weeks.

Spend a few minutes on YouTube, and it’s easy to find the videos most popular among users of the site. While looking at what viewers watched is indeed interesting, looking back a step to see what visitors to the site actually wanted to watch (evidenced by what they searched for), provides an unfiltered peek into users intentions for visiting the site.

The list below shows the top 40 terms visitors to YouTube searched for on the video sharing website in June. Although YouTube’s Community Guidelines state that the site is “not for pornography or sexually explicit content,” apparently a large percentage of YouTube’s audience has yet to get the message, or remain undaunted in their quest to find such material on the site.

Also interesting: music videos command the majority of the top searches. 28 of the top 40 terms searched on YouTube in June related to either a musician (if you can call some that) or a song title. While the record labels have created popular channels on YouTube, pirated videos continue to command a significant amount of total views. R&B artist Rihanna’s popular “Take a Bow” video, for example, has been viewed over 15 million times on the Universal Music Group channel. That accounts for just 40% of total views of the video on YouTube.

Click here to see the complete list of top 40 YouTube search terms in June, and while you’re there, be sure to check out other interesting data Compete has made available on our “Data Hub.”