Last night, Empire ran a paid, in-episode Pepsi ad. Already the episode was driving engagement, but the Pepsi ad definitely had something to do with the social turn out. Amobee Brand Intelligence looked at digital engagement at over 600,000 sites across platforms to see how it performed.
According to Amobee, Empire generated 788,022 tweets around between 9 p.m. – Midnight ET and sentiment was 17 percent positive, 58 percent neutral, and 25 percent negative. But don’t fret: fans weren’t hating on the show, really. A lot of negative sentiment was about having to wait until March (March!) to see how it all turns out.
During the same time frame, there were 73,366 Empire related tweets around Hakeem, indicating that his betrayal of the family, by voting to oust his father as the CEO of Empire Entertainment, was the most talked about moment of the episode. There were also 43,006 Empire related tweets around Anika during the same time period, amid speculation that’s she’s the person who pushed Rhonda down a flight of stairs. There was 55,053 Empire related tweets around Lucious, in the 3 hour time period; with 36 percent of those Tweets focusing on the intentionally cringe-worthy moment when he tells Jamal, “She fixed you,” insinuating that Jamel hooking up with Skye cured him of his homosexuality.
Empire’s in-episode Pepsi ad starred show character Jamal Lyon, the culmination of a three episode storyline. There were 8,829 tweets around Pepsi between 9 p.m. – Midnight ET last night. During that time, Twitter sentiment around Pepsi was 23 percent positive, 65 percent neutral, and 12 percent negative.
The product placement deal wasn’t a totally big deal though. Since the start of the 3 episode arc on Empire, engagement around Pepsi on entertainment content actually decreased -10 percent, comparing Nov. 18 – Dec. 3 to Nov. 2-17. Only 5 percent of all digital engagement around Pepsi on Entertainment content between Nov. 18 – Dec. 3 was Empire related. For comparison, 18 percent of all digital engagement around Pepsi in October was Pepsi Perfect related for Back To The Future Day promotion.
Maybe it’s something nostalgia related, or the fact that the Pepsi product placement and episode arc was a little obvious. The buy-in didn’t hurt Pepsi, but who knows if it was worth it.