HBO is on yet another hot streak. It just kicked off its latest critically acclaimed miniseries Sharp Objects, starring Amy Adams as a troubled journalist who returns to her hometown to investigate two murders — and recently snagged multiple Emmy nominations for Game of Thrones, Westworld and other programs.
We partnered with Inscape, the TV measurement company with glass-level data from a panel of more than 9 million smart TVs and devices, to examine not only Sharp Objects but to take a broad look at viewership trends around HBO in general. Also below: advertising insight, courtesy of iSpot.tv, the real-time TV ad measurement company with attention and conversion analytics from more than eight million smart TVs.
We first compared viewership between Sharp Objects and Westworld, which just wrapped up its second season. Interestingly, while 42% of the households that watched Sharp Objects had also watched Westworld, only 24% of the Westworld audience has tuned in to Sharp Objects.
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When it comes to non-HBO shows, The Walking Dead (AMC), Saturday Night Live (NBC) and Modern Family (ABC) are three of the most popular among HBO viewers. In general, though, in terms of affinity to other networks, premium channels (especially HBO Comedy, Starz and ActionMAX) do particularly well with HBO viewers vs. traditional broadcast or cable networks.
Turning to location, aside from a few hot spots in the Northeast and Southern Florida, HBO audiences overall appear to be most heavily concentrated in the Midwest and West Coast. This is echoed, although not precisely, in the viewership for Sharp Objects and Westworld specifically. (On the heatmaps below, the darker the color in the graphic, the more households were tuning in.)
According to iSpot, since May 1 HBO has spent an estimated $4.6 million running 21 spots 1,400 times, generating 591.4 million TV ad impressions. For the five spots with the largest spend, three of them belong to Sharp Objects (the other two are for Succession).
This is the Sharp Objects spot that has had the most spend.
