Borat's Effect on Kazakhstan 

 If you’ve seen it or paid some attention to what’s going on in the popular media in the past six months, you will not have missed the movie ``Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan’’ by Sacha Baron Cohen.  The movie went from huge hype to packed movie theatres, and is due out on March 6 on DVD.  Some described the movie as ``brilliant’’, for others it was 15 minutes of mediocre jokes drawn out into 82 minutes of film.   

 Whatever you may think, the government of Kazakhstan certainly took issue.  They felt that their country was portrayed in a particularly unfair light, and started an image campaign with advertisements in the New York Times and other news media (see  here  for an article on that matter by the NYT).  But what actually was the impact on Kazakhstan’s image of that movie?  Fifteen minutes on Google Trends are suggestive (or  frivolous , as Amy suggested). 

  Here  is the timeline of events from Wikipedia: Borat was first screened at some film festivals from July 2006 onwards.  It was officially released at the Toronto Film Festival on September 7, 2006 which started the hype.  The movie opened in early November in the US, Canada and most European countries.  It was number 1 at the US box office for two weeks and only left the top 10 in mid-December.   

 Here’s a graph of search terms and their associated search volume from Google Trends until November 2006 (you can get this live  here  and modify as you please).  The blue line is the term ``borat movie’’; the red line is ``kazakhstan’’ and the orange line is ``uzbekistan’’ which will serve as (admittedly imperfect) control country.  The news reference volume refers to the number of times each topic appeared in Google News. 

   


 As you can see, searches for ``borat movie'' take off in September 2006 which coincides with the official release. It spikes in late October before the movie opens at the box office and goes down afterwards.  The event B is the announcement of the movie as picked up by Google News.  All as expected even if the blips before July are a little strange.  

 Interestingly the search volume for ``uzbekistan’’ follows that of ``kazakhstan’’ quite well before the movie appears in the spotlight in September.  From September onwards the volume for ``kazakhstan’’ somewhat tracks the volume for the movie instead.  If you were to look at monthly data you would see that the relationship is not as clear but there does seem to be a trend.  So maybe the movie generated some interest in the country. 

 Here’s another chart for September 2006 (from  here ).  The blue and red lines are as before, but now the orange line is for ``kazakstan’’.  It turns out that you can write the name correctly with or without the ``h’’.  Maybe people who spell it for the first time would use this version.  This search term appears in the search volume just before the movie hits the theaters. 

   

 Google Trends gives another hint.  If you look at the cities of origin for the searches, you will notice a mix of US/European countries and cities in the second half of 2006.  And ``kazakstan’’ is mostly searched by British users.  In the first half of the year however almost all searches come from Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan. 

 Now, obviously nothing is causal and proven but it does look interesting.  Not only did the search volume on Google shoot up around the time of the introduction of the movie, but also the geographic composition of the searches shifted to where the movie was very popular and the country not well known before Fall 2006  

 What does all this mean for Kazakhstan?  Is this good or bad publicity?  It seems that people became interested in the country beyond the movie (see a USA Today story  here ).  A  poll  of users of a UK travel website put Kazakhstan in the Top 3 places to visit (right after Italy and the UK if you believe the results), and the Lonely Planet already has an  article  on the real Kazakhstan ``beyond Borat''.  We'll see if those people are really going in the end, and if the trend persists over time as Google supplies more information.  But all in all the movie might have generated some useful publicity for the country.  Estimating the impact on tourism and world opinion, anyone?