A first-ever partnership, search insights, massive reach, mobile spikes and unique content
Oscar viewers won’t just be huddled around their TV sets this year—increasingly, more of them are going online. In the last several years, Yahoo! Entertainment has seen growing online engagement around award shows. Mobile and web users are not only searching for information on The Academy Awards, The Golden Globes and The Grammys, they are also engaging with unique Yahoo! content before, during and after the live TV events.
“The awards season for entertainment fans is like three Super Bowls...and there is this massive amount of Monday morning quarterbacking,” Sibyl Goldman, VP of Yahoo! Entertainment, recently told Ad Week.
A new awards show partnership
This mounting online interest in award shows posed an attractive opportunity for the Chrysler brand. Interested in driving home new brand positioning focused on luxury, the U.S. automaker signed on to be the first-ever exclusive sponsor of all of Yahoo!’s award show season coverage. With the new partnership, the Chrysler brand received 100% mindshare on omg! for the Golden Globes, on Yahoo! Music for The Grammys and on Yahoo! Movies during the upcoming Oscars.
So what makes Yahoo! the ideal award show season partner? Four words: search, audience, mobile and content.
Insights on search
The 83rd Annual Academy Awards won’t air on ABC until Sunday, February 27, but the buzz online has already started. Searches on Yahoo! for “Oscars 2011” are up 1,403%. The top states searching for “Oscars” on Yahoo! are California, Illinois, Texas, Washington and New Jersey. Currently, “Black Swan” is the top searched-for nominated film, followed by “True Grit” and “127 Hours.”
While searches for the award show are split evenly between men and women, searchers definitely skew older. Only 16% of searches for “Oscars” were made by the under-24 demographic. No wonder The Academy decided to bring in twenty-something hosts Anne Hathaway and James Franco.
Audience reach
Contrary to popular belief, excitement for The Oscars doesn’t hit fever pitch online until the show airs on television. Traffic numbers on Yahoo! tend to be highest the day after award shows, as users go online to get the information, news and photos they’re looking for when and how they want them. On the day after the 2010 Oscars telecast, Yahoo! Movies attracted more than 11 million unique visitors to its site, generating more than 590 million pageviews. Yahoo!’s omg!, the #1 entertainment news destination, recorded more than nine million unique visitors and more than 600 million pageviews on the day after the 2010 Golden Globes telecast.
Engagement on mobile
The audience story seems to be the same on mobile. A recent Yahoo! study revealed that the highest peaks in traffic and engagement on the Yahoo! Mobile site occurred immediately after the 2010 Oscars show ended on TV. Clearly, more and more users turn to the Web once they tune out from the TV.
The study also showed consistent spikes in mobile Internet usage during commercial breaks during live TV events. Here's more on what mobile users found most engaging on Yahoo! during the 2010 Oscars:
› Users consumed content on Yahoo! Front Page up to 39% more
› Browsing activity was 125% higher on Yahoo! News
› Users searched on Yahoo! Search 13% more
› Users checked and sent email 6% more
More unique content
This year, Yahoo! has borrowed a page from Yahoo! Sports and introduced an online fantasy game for users to pick their 2011 Oscar winners, and to share these picks with friends via social media. In addition to beefing up fan favorite blogs and photo galleries, Yahoo! has also launched a new video web series called “Road to the Awards.” The series premiered in January with a preview of The Golden Globes, and the second episode went live before The Grammys. This week, Yahoo! users can watch Road to the Awards videos on hot Oscar topics like celebrity gifts, the nominees and red carpet fashion. Chrysler is the sponsor of all Road to the Awards episodes.
For full coverage of the Oscars, visit http://oscars.movies.yahoo.com/.
--- Dianne Molina
