Retailers understand the power of influencer marketing, but working with celebrities can be costly. With the Oscars approaching, the buzz around nominees presents a prime opportunity for retailers to tap into trending conversations. By aligning products with the event’s themes, leveraging celebrity influence, and even identifying potential brand ambassadors, retailers can create timely, impactful campaigns that drive engagement and sales.
The challenge is two-fold. First, retailers need to understand which celebrities resonate with their target audience, then determine how to leverage that connection to drive awareness and sales.
This insight extends beyond retail—media and entertainment companies also gain value by understanding how their talent captures audience attention. For streaming services in a competitive landscape, these insights reveal opportunities that traditional analysis might overlook, helping them stay ahead.
Human judgment can sometimes reinforce biases, focusing on familiar narratives or selective details. Gaining an objective, data-driven understanding of viewer sentiment is crucial for making informed decisions.
Let’s dive deeper into these insights below.
Identifying the right influencers is a complex process influenced by multiple factors. Brands must consider their target demographic, online engagement channels, and how these elements shift based on the campaign, season, and global events. With so many moving pieces, strategic selection is essential.
The Oscars provide a unique opportunity by bringing fresh faces into the spotlight, offering brands new potential spokespeople and influencers. However, choosing the right one is key to making an authentic connection with consumers.
Over the past three months (12/1–2/1), these top names have been trending in Oscars-related conversations. Some represent characters or films, while others are actors and actresses:
Quid’s AI Summary for this chart makes rapid sense of the data, and shows that 15% of the online discussions include posts about actors that have been generating buzz leading up to the event:
Figure 1: Quid AI Summary of Academy Awards Online Narratives About Buzz and Predictions Leading Up to the Event
It offers insight key to retailer and streaming strategies and demonstrates the importance of understanding the context behind big emerging trends.
For example, although Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain) is 19th on our chart above, online sentiment about him far outweighs that of Karla Sofia Gascon (Emilia Perez), as shown below.
Sentiment about Kieran Culkin (left) vs sentiment about Karla Sofia Gascon (right).
Why? For companies monitoring discussions about the Oscars, Quid AI’s identification of “Emilia Perez buzz” warranted a closer look at what was driving this negative sentiment. Karla Sofia Gascon has faced backlash for resurfaced tweets about Muslims and George Floyd. She has apologized, but collaborating with celebrities facing controversy might not be the best look for a brand.
Quid’s AI summaries also indicate where to begin the search for emerging trends around the Oscars. As we see in the summary below, 13% of discussions about the Oscars are about streaming platforms accelerating cultural shifts, and how both audiences and the film industry are responding:
Figure 2: Quid AI Summary of Academy Awards Online Narratives About The Impact of Streaming Platforms
But how do we put this insight into action?
The overarching Net Sentiment for the Oscars has taken a hit recently, registering at 49% on a scale out of a possible 100%. Net Sentiment expresses the ratio of positive or negative sentiment out of the total, about a given brand or topic:
The corresponding fluctuation report, analyzing changes in sentiment, is no surprise, considering the largely negative insight surfaced earlier about Karla Sofia Gascon:
So, it will be important for retailers to understand the sentiment story when considering famous faces to feature on topical promotions, and when building on the Oscars buzz.
We have established ways to uncover which celebrities are positively resonating with online audiences, but who are these audiences, and do they align with yours? We can filter for all Oscars mentions in the past three months that include these celebrities to find out. If analyzing Kieran Culkin as an example, it reveals a predominantly female audience under the age of 35 and a host of deeper insights about their interests and professions:
We can further analyze this specific audience to determine which brands they’re discussing and where:
Could we see Kieren appearing in promotions with the NBA or NFL due to the crossover appeal with this audience, or even in a new cologne collaboration with Dior? Perhaps!
According to the analysis, this insight can also support enhancing streaming services viewership.
Should streaming services prioritize promoting movies or shows featuring specific artists? If so, which social channels offer the highest engagement and ROI for tapping into conversations around major entertainment events?
When we explore associated conversations with this “Kieren Culkin audience” and its mentions of Disney, we see social posts mentioning favorite shows. This could signal guest appearance opportunities that could boost struggling stats, not that the Kardashians are struggling for stats:
Though these posts don’t mention him, they’re made from an audience of people engaging with discussions about or around Kieren Culkin. These connections are difficult to surface organically without AI-powered discovery.
Insights can also be surfaced about types of new movies and shows this audience would love to see, or are sick of seeing, as captured below. The emotions and behaviors of this microcosm could be the precise insight a streaming platform needs to guide the creation of the next hit series or even the next genre.
Furthermore, where should these platforms promote new shows?
If streaming platforms want to target the Oscars’ audience to either promote or test out ideas for new shows, knowing where they’re active online and what they’re talking about on these channels is invaluable. You wouldn’t want to promote a literary figure biopic to a group interested in horror genres, after all.
Knowing that X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, and forums are key platforms is just the beginning. Each channel has its own influential voices, niche subreddits, and trending hashtags that shape conversations. This discovery process can be as detailed or broad as needed, uncovering insights that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Get in touch for a demo, and we’ll show you how to leverage these insights to craft powerful, Oscar-inspired campaigns—capturing new audiences with offers that align perfectly with their interests before they even ask!