Research Recap of 2008 Academy Awards Released

Nearly 94 percent of the 32 million Americans who watched this year’s Oscars watched the live telecast - but some 2 million recorded the event on DVR and watched it later in the same evening, according to Nielsen, which released a research recap of the event, writes MarketingCharts.

Viewer Demographics

Of the Academy Awards viewers…

• 86 percent were white.
• 7 percent were Hispanic.
• 7 percent were African-American.

8.2 million households watched the Awards within the 10 largest U.S. markets:

• New York ranked the highest with a household rating of 29.7.
• Chicago (28.5) and San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose (27.2) followed.

Advertising

• ABC aired nine promotional announcements spanning 3:50 mm:ss. Seven of these were for primetime programs.
• There were 43 national advertisements (see Academy Awards Commercial Listing).
• There were 23 minutes of total commercial time, down from 24 minutes in 2007.
• L’Oreal and Coca-Cola tied as the top advertisers with 8 spots, 3:30 mm:ss commercial time each, followed by General Motors and JC Penney (5 spots, 3:00 mm:ss each) - view table.
• JC Penney’s American Living Home Furnishings advertisements, at 10:14 pm and 9:48 pm, were the No. 1 and No. 2 highest-rated commercial minutes of the show. See table of the ten highest-rated commercials.

Online Traffic

• Traffic to Yahoo’s Oscars website (oscars.movies.yahoo.com) went up 201 percent on post-Oscars Monday, to 2.3 million unique visitors (from 751,000 on the day of the telecast).
• In 2007, there were 3.3 million unique visitors to Oscar-related sites during the day after.
• Online conversations about the event increased immediately after the telecast on Feb 24, until 1.5 percent of all blog posts were referring to the event in some way, as seen in this graph.

Award Predictions

The 600 Americans surveyed by the Hey! Nielsen opinion network made correct winner predictions for most categories of the Academy Awards - view table here.

But they were surprised by…

• Marion Cotillard’s Best Actress victory - not Ellen Page’s (Juno), as 32 percent had predicted
• Tilda Swinton’s win in the Best Supporting Actress category
• Best Documentary Oscar’s going to Taxi to the Dark Side - not Sicko, as 37 percent had predicted

About the data: The Nielsen Company gathers its research from its marketing (ACNielsen), media (Nielsen Media Research), and online intelligence (Nielsen Online) units.