Oscar Audience Numbers Are In

Sunday night’s Oscars brought in 37 million viewers. In a year where most of the nominated films were not huge box office draws (only one Best Picture nominee earned more than $100 million), this is a notable audience despite being down 15 percent from last year’s 15-year high of 43.7 million viewers.

Tweets were also down year-over-year, although it’s important to remember what record-breaking tweet this is compared to. Nielsen reported 5.9 million Oscar-related tweets by 1.4 million unique users, seen by a unique audience of 13 million. Last year the Twitter crowd was 7 percent higher with 30 percent more Twitter impressions.

Lego was the leading brand across social media, mentioned 50,000 times.

When it comes to advertising the Oscars are a second sort of Super Bowl with ads costing upwards of $2 million per spot. This year viewers were treated to a nice portfolio of work, particularly thanks to Comcast, Adobe, Dove, M&Ms, Samsung and Apple. What made all of these connect was that they highly considered the context of the event.

Many of the reasons you’d buy an ad in the Oscars are similar to the Super Bowl, with an audience that skews more female.

Comcast introduced their “talking guide” in a beautiful way with the story of Emily, a 7-year-old girl who was born blind.

Adobe, who has been masterful with online ads, aired 25 Years of Photoshop.

while Dove continued their wonderful brand purpose with #SpeakBeautiful.

And M&Ms added some very nice charm into the evening.

For a full rundown, the WSJ was live blogging throughout the show.

And finally, the design for the Best Picture Title Sequence was a thing of beauty…