As I am sure many of you are aware Johnny Depp is currently in the process of suing his ex-wife for $50 million. This is due to the face that Heard (His ex-wide) wrote an op-ed in 2018 about her experience with domestic violence. This effected Johnny Depp’s reputation and career.
We are currently week four of the trail. Douglas Bania took the stand on the 2nd of May as Johnny’s expert and spoke about Google Trends.
“Doug specializes in assessing damages for infringements of copyright, trademarks, and publicity rights.
He’s also dealt with defamation, marketing strategy research, royalty rate evaluations, and social media and the Internet.”
Google Trends
Google Trends is a platform where you can access search results made to Google. Using Google trends enables you to see what is being searched and when. It is a great platform to use as it allows you to see how popular a certain topic is.
Google trends was introduced on the 11th May 2006. It “is the only keyword research tool that offers insights based on actual Google search data.” (SEJ)
The fact it is the only tool to use actual data makes it one of the most reliable sources to use when it comes to searching keywords.
Douglas Bania used google trend to demonstrate how the op-ed had a huge impact on Johnny’s reputation and career.
Bellow you can hear Douglas Bania talk through this Google tends timeline.
This Timeline shows the peaks of when many people were searching for Johnny Depp. The higher the peak the more people were searching (on google) about him. The lower the peak the less people were searching.
As you can see from the graph, before the red lines, the spikes were a lot higher up the graph. This means that a lot more people were searching about him before the two incidents in 2016 and 2018. This would mean every time someone searched for a movie he was in or a award he won, the spike would increase. However, after 2016 and 2018 you can see that the spikes do not reach as high up the graph. This means that less people were searching for him.
Google trends is a great platform due to its ability to demonstrate and pinpoint specific years and moments to record the most accurate data. It is a good platform not just in trial but in everyday businesses too. Having the ability to see the peaks and troughs of data will allow you to see when the biggest interest in a topic or trend is.
Q score
A Q score is the consumers response to either a brand or person. In simple terms it is a way of seeing if a person or brand is liked or not.
Douglas Bania went on to talk about the Q scores from this data.
Having a Q score can give you vital information about yourself/ your business. The ability to seeing whether you are known as someone who is liked or someone who is not, can give you an opportunity to change. Q scores go hand in hand with Google trends. While google trends is good to see if you are being searched it does not show whether you are liked by those searching. However, a Q score can do just that.
In this example it showed that Johnny Depp had a higher Q score before the 2018 op-ed. This means that according to the data he was liked more before 2018.
If you would like to hear more of what Douglas Bania said about google trends and Q scores, you can watch it here.
