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In yet another effort to court a younger demographic, Oscar producers picked 29-year-old Anne Hathaway and 33-year-old James Franco to host the famed awards show this year. It was an unusual choice not only because the two are not seasoned comedians—recent hosts have included Ellen DeGeneres, Chris Rock, and Jon Stewart—but also because they are almost 20 years younger than the average age of the telecast’s recent hosts, which has hovered around 50 for the past ten years. If the host selection alone failed to make the effort obvious, the pair’s tongue-in-cheek banter did: “Anne, I must say you look so beautiful and so hip," said Franco in his opening greeting. "Thank you, James," Hathaway quipped, "you look very appealing to a younger demographic as well."
A real demographic concern hides behind this self-effacing humor: the Academy Awards traditionally appeals more to an older film community rather than to younger viewers. But, the goal is now to make the Academy Awards more inviting for younger audiences. The ABC broadcast is the second most-watched TV event after the Super Bowl and drew an impressive 41.2 million viewers last year -- a five-year high. But although the event remains pricey, at $1.7 million a spot, the broadcast's median age in 2009 was 49.5. Last year's ratings among 18- to 34-year-olds actually decreased 3% despite the increase in total viewers.
Some have speculated that the nomination process contributes to the demographics divide. Anecdotally, this seems true. Take 2008, when the wildly successful summer blockbuster ‘The Dark Knight’ was pushed out of the race by films like ‘The Reader’ and ‘Frost/Nixon’. It is easy to imagine indignant twenty-somethings across the United States irked by the fact that Academy voters snubbed what they considered to be a “great” movie simply because it had the misfortune of being a summer release in favor of dramas that neither they nor their friends had ever seen.
In response to this criticism, the Academy decided in 2009 that it would expand the number of Best Picture nominations from five to ten. Academy president Sidney Ganis hinted at the reason for the switch saying, “I would not be telling you the truth if the words ‘Dark Knight’ did not come up.” Summer films have crept into the short list since the change: three in 2009 and four this year.
Will the Academy’s move to make summer blockbusters more competitive result in a younger demographic? Comscore data suggests the effort may be having an impact.
Comscore AdEffx provides a granular examination of the demographic differences between summer and winter “film intenders,” (defined according to the time of the year when they searched for movie show-times or movies at a local cinema). The data show that summer film intenders skew slightly younger than winter film intenders, with a higher percentage of visitors in the 18-24 year old and 25-34 year old segments:
In light of the age differences, it’s perhaps not surprising that summer film intenders also tend to have lower incomes than their winter peers. While summer intenders are slightly wealthier than the Internet average, winter intenders are even wealthier.
But a silver lining in this income differential actually benefits the silver screen. Despite their lower income skews, summer film intenders devote a larger share of their online transactions (3.8%) to entertainment and movie tickets than winter film intenders (2.5%). As income decreases, share of online transactions allocated to the movie ticket category increases, suggesting that less affluent summer moviegoers are willing to allocate a higher percentage of their discretionary spending to movie entertainment. So despite having lower incomes than their winter counterparts, summer intenders still drive relatively more spending in this particular category. It’s no surprise the movie industry is courting these consumers.
If a younger, summer movie-going demographic is what the Academy wants, then that is what the Academy got—at least online. In order to understand how demographic interest shifted in the past two years, we compared search behavior by age demographic for the month prior to the Oscars in 2011 vs. 2008 using a selection of Oscar-related search terms like “Oscar nominations” and “Best Picture.” The results showed that searchers interested in the 2011 Oscars skewed younger than in 2008.
More specifically, while the younger demographics — particularly 18-24 year olds and 25-34 year olds — showed below average searching interest in the Oscars in 2008, they showed above average interest in 2011. Not only that, but 18–24 year olds exhibited the highest relative interest by far.
So it appears that the Oscar producers were successful in achieving their objective of courting the younger demographics, at least as evidenced by these consumers’ online behavior. With younger audiences accounting for a substantial portion of box office dollars today, it is important to bring these movie-goers into the Oscar fold and support the long-term health of the motion picture industry.