Five lessons from the Oscars 2011 marketing blitz

As international television events go, it doesn't get much bigger than Hollywood's night of nights, the Academy Awards. In the US, the Oscars will be watched by an estimated 41 million views, making it the second most-watched television event of the year, behind the Super Bowl.
And like the Super Bowl, which in the last decade has become an annual marketing event on the level of Christmas, the Oscars are morphing into a major event on the advertising calendar.
According to the Los Angeles Times, broadcaster ABC will sell about $80 million worth of ads during the coverage, up from about $70 million last year.
Big advertisers set to use the ceremony as a platform to launch marketing drives include Hyundai, Best Buy and Living Social, the biggest competitor to group buying pioneer Groupon.
But it's not just big advertisers trying to cash in – some US SMEs are also using the Oscars to try and grab a bit of the hype.

The Oscars, On Twitter: Over 1.2 Million Tweets, 388K Users Tweeting

Twitter has changed the way we watch television. Say what you will about the 83rd Annual Oscars (and thus far the consensus is “meh”), you’ve probably already said it on Twitter.  Mass Relevance and TweetReach, a Twitter analytics service with commercial access to the Twitter API, have teamed up to make a data map of yesterday’s mass conversation.

The Awards For Best Oscar-Related Tweets Go To…

If we learned one thing from the Oscar telecast Sunday night it might be that a bad, boring awards show can make for some entertaining Twitter content (and that an emerging medium can thrive on the rotting carcass of a dying one). If you checked your Twitter feed at any point during the broadcast (and for some time after), you were likely inundated with reports, many of them more insightful or humorous than the show itself.

The reviews for the Oscar telecast were predictable, with the show being called bloated, indulgent, old-fashioned and awkward. The consensus though also seems to be that many people wouldn’t have it any other way. Should you have wished, you could have followed all the action on Twitter alone, but of course you’d miss out on all the Gay Super Bowl fun (see Best Hashtag).

Tina Brown, 'Morning Joe' Team Roast Oscars (VIDEO)

Add the "Morning Joe" team and Tina Brown to the list of vicious reviews of Sunday night's Oscars. The entire panel on Monday's show had nothing but contempt for the show--Joe Scarborough called it a "disgrace"--but Brown led the pack, ripping into co-host Anne Hathaway with glee.
Brown said the show was the "very worst" she'd ever seen. And she said Hathaway was "just this drip, as far as I can see. I could not take her simpering...her self-confidence was so misplaced."
Later, Brown laid into Hathaway again, calling her "utterly devoid of any real humor."
The crew also attempted to figure out just what was going on with James Franco. Mika Brzezinski, Willie Geist and Brown seemed sure that something untoward was going on with him. Brown speculated that a "backstage bong had completely incapacitated his head."
WATCH:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Source: huffingtonpost.com

Oscars Audience Drops 9.8%

A smaller audience watched the Oscars ceremony on Sunday night, reversing two years of growth for the one of television's biggest events.
About 37.6 million people watched the Academy Awards, according to early Nielsen Co. data provided by broadcaster ABC. There were few surprises through the evening, and favored best-picture nominee— "The King's Speech" —picked up the top honor.
The tally was down 9.8% from the 41.7 million who watched a year ago, and ranks as the fifth-least watched ceremony since at least 1974, according to Nielsen.

The Oscars 'Twilight' Surprise? AUTO-TUNE!

Even though the "Twilight" and "Harry Potter" movies aren't exactly Oscar bait, and even though the casts thereof were notably not in attendance at tonight's 83rd Annual Academy Awards, fans of the wizard-and-vampire genres still had a good reason to tune in for the broadcast: a highly anticipated, majorly hyped musical moment about halfway through the show. GAH, the excitement! What could it be?!
Well, tune in we did—sticking it out through seven acts of chatter, back-patting and James Franco in a magenta dress to see it. And while Robert Pattinson didn't show up (sorry girls, we know you're disappointed), what did happen was something even more extraordinary.
And by "extraordinary," we mean "T-Pain would have LOVED this."

The 6 weirdest gender moments of the 2011 Oscars

Anne Hathaway and James Franco (Photo: Associated Press)

Last night's 2011 Academy Awards telecast was terrible as ever, a grinding, three-and-a-quarter hour display of awkward film industry promotion. Best Supporting Actress award winner Melissa Leo said it best: "It's about selling motion pictures! And respecting the work!" The annual exercise of polite clapping, at least, offered a few crumbles of gender weirdness with which to fill my blogging quotas. The five weirdest gender moments in the Oscar telecast, below: