ABC’s beloved sitcom Roseanne returned to TV screens last week with its original cast, including Roseanne Barr as Roseanne Conner and John Goodman as Dan Conner. B&C partnered with Canvs, the emotion measurement company, and iSpot, the TV ad measurement company with attention and conversion data from more than eight million smart TVs, to see how fans reacted to the first three episodes, and to serve up insights on the brands that backed the series reboot.
According to Canvs, there have been 69,722 Emotional Reactions (ERs) on Twitter around the series so far, with love being the primary emotion expressed, occurring in 26.6% of ERs. Excited (13.3%), funny (10.8%) and enjoy (10%) also abounded.
Of note is the presence of dislike (8%) and mixed emotions (4.9%) — aside from general comments about not enjoying the revival, some of the negativity came from the charged conversation associated with the show: the premiere's storyline had some political plot points, and Roseanne Barr has made it clear that she’s pro-Trump, just like the fictional character Roseanne on the show.
[embed]https://twitter.com/pattybounds/status/978811640341762048[/embed]
Predictably, “Roseanne” was the most-mentioned term, followed by “return” and “reboot." "Trump supporter" and "Donald Trump" also appear in the top 10 mentioned topics around the first three episodes.
According to iSpot, brands spent an estimated $5.86 million to place ads during the season so far, with Lyrica and HUMIRA leading the chart, followed by Pepsi, Mitsubishi and Ashley HomeStore.
Looking more generally at the top-spending industries, wireless communication companies led the way, closely followed by auto makers, soda brands and quick serve restaurants.
A look into audience demographics proves to be interesting: about 70% of viewers were over the age of 35, with 54.52% female and 45.48% male.
We also worked with Inscape, the TV measurement company with glass-level data from a panel of more than 8 million smart TVs and devices, to see where Roseanne audiences are located. The heatmaps below detail the location of households who have watched the new episodes so far (the darker the color in the graphics, the more households were tuning in, with the baseline normalized by each state’s population). Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's been strong viewership in regions that voted for Donald Trump.
