I observe two major televised holidays: the first weekend of the NCAA basketball tourney and Oscar Night. Were I forced to give up one of them, it’d be bye-bye roundball. As a filmmaker and recovering screenwriter, I love my Academy Awards® (and, yes, it is a trademark of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science).
Sunday night was the 76th edition of Hollywood’s biggest night, when couture is king -- er, queen -- everybody looks beautiful, and Billy Crystal is bound to find himself on a horse at some point during the show.
But in the past few years, it’s become more than that. Oscar’s little TV show, which is watched by more than 1 billion people, has become an online marketing opportunity as well. And since it’s still a bit of a new frontier, the opportunities are endless.
You get an audience that loves what it’s seeing, is emotionally engaged (“Who dressed her!?”), and doesn’t run to the restroom during timeouts. But where should a savvy marketer put his or her money?
I’m a die-hard fan, but I’ve also done online around the show. And since I never shy away from a chance to pontificate, here’s what I’ve learned in the past, and which sites would receive my statuette -- and my dollars -- this year.
The Potential
At Netscape, we started the season with a Countdown to Oscar, which comprised any content we could scrounge for the 28 days leading up to the big show. And we updated live during the show, using content from E! Online and CNN. Then we’d follow up for several days after with our own content and photos and stories from E!, People, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle and others.
We pulled in more than 8 million page views in 2001, my last year there, 11 million if you count stories that appeared outside the Oscar mini-site. Although to be fair, I think half of those were for one photo of Pamela Anderson and Liz Hurley “busting out” at a post-Oscar party.
That’s just one experience. If you take that times the total number of sites covering the event, we’re talking a gazillion possible impressions, give or take a boatload. I was glad to see that this year more advertisers showed up online -- including such high-profile brands as Cadillac and Revlon, along with dozens more.
On to the Fun Stuff
Not to make my utterly unscientific process suspect in any way, but I offer two caveats before we get into it:
- My wife wasn’t home, so I juggled watching the show and being interactive while keeping my 2-year-old son entertained -- which primarily involved playing football with an empty plastic cup.
- Since I run an Apple iBook most of the time at home and I don’t have an MSN subscription for my PC, MSN wasn’t in the running. I apologize to the folks in Redmond.
So who are my nominees?
Oscar.com
Strengths: This is the official site of ABC’s broadcast. Good streaming video from the Red Carpet. Nice countdown. Good history section.
Missed Opportunities: "Extended TV" (ETV) interactive activities during the show were slow and not terribly intuitive.
Oscar.com home page
Oscar.com ETV game
AOL Entertainment
Strengths: AOL has tie-ins with Time Warner brands like People.com, Entertainment Weekly and InStyle. The new 9.0 broadband client should have been a natural for PC users to get great content.
Missed Opportunities: Tie-ins with Time Warner brands like People.com, Entertainment Weekly and InStyle are only available to AOL members. Chat -- which is what built the AOL monolith -- was next to impossible to get into. I got a “too busy” message three times, and had to log off and log back on until I finally got a chat room, which was filled with people in an argument about something unrelated to the Academy Awards®.
AOL's Oscars 2004 screen
E! Online
Strengths: One of the best entertainment brands anywhere. They live, breath, eat and sleep this stuff. They’re not afraid to be snarky when they need to be. I love their Rank “sizzle meter” that lets you rate each actor and actress as Joan and Melissa rip them apart on E!’s Red carpet pre-show. The Blow-by-Blow is perfect for people who can’t watch the show. And the Backstage Blog is fabulous.
Missed Opportunities: None that I could see… again.
E! Online's Academy Awards® main page
E! Online's Rank screen
And the Winner Is…
It’s E! Online -- in case you hadn’t guessed. They just do awards shows better than anyone else.
So what’s this mean for you? Nothing unless you’re interested in trying something different to get at the people who watch this annual parade of Prada, primping and press craziness.
Although we don’t have online audience numbers yet, I’ll bet they’re astounding again and higher than last year.
If I were you, I’d start thinking of something really unique to do for next year -- something so outrageously out of the box that you can get tons of press leading up to the show, a big gasp during the show, and lots more press afterward.
Hook up with one of my nominees and let your imaginations run wild.
And I’ll see you on the Red Carpet next year.
