Oscars 2015 audience at 6-year low as host Neil Patrick Harris fails to replicate Ellen DeGeneres' success
The 87th Academy Awards suffered from a 16 per cent drop in audience and substantially less social media engagement than 2014’s event, according to data from Nielsen.
The Oscars 2015 turned out to be the least watched event since Hugh Jackman's time in charge back in 2009. Numbers greatly slipped from Ellen DeGeneres’ tenure as host in 2014, which pulled in a record international audience of 43.7 million people.
This year viewers dropped to 36.3 million, just topping 2009’s 36.3 million, despite the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reportedly spending $5.5m on marketing.
Social engagement was understandably down too as Neil Patrick Harris failed to replicate the success of 2014’s iconic (and viral) Oscar selfie despite him shedding his clothes at one point during the show.
As a result, tweets dropped from reaching a worldwide audience of 13.9 million Twitter users in 2014 to 5.9 million tweets with a reach of 13 million users.
Despite the slump in the Oscars' reach, advertisers and brands proved more willing to invest in its audience over the Super Bowl, spending 22.6 viewers per ad dollar compared with the Super Bowl’s 25.4 viewers.