With the Pan Am Games over, and a couple weeks before the Parapan Am Games, it’s safe to say the event has been a success so far. The latest television and social media numbers from IPG Mediabrands show that, despite initial reservations, Canadians not only watched the events, they also interacted on social media about medals, stars and performances over the course of the two week competition.
About 63% of the population – or 22 million Canadians – watched at least one minute or more of the Pan Am Games, according to Numeris data supplied by IPG Mediabrands. Analysis of these numbers is based on data from Numeris, Sysomos, LeadSift and Toronto2015.org
Some 32% were families with children under 18 at home, and 40% were aged 32 to 64. Torontonians were the most enthusiastic games watchers, comprising 26% of the total viewership.
In total, the opening ceremony was watched by 5.5 million people with Cirque de Soleil as the central act. The closing ceremony, featuring Kanye West, Pitbull and Serena Ryder, pulled in 6 million viewers, also in total. Overall, 20.7 million people watched the games’ coverage.
On social media, too, the games did well, even if Kanye West stole the Twitter show with 12,700 tweets about him.
“We also gave our thumbs and fingers a workout sharing and giving social media shout-outs galore. Both the athletes and the Panamania events had us tweeting in the thousands,” says Loraine Cordery, insights manager at IPG Mediabrands.
Brands gained some attention during the games as well with the CBC and the Toronto Star running frequent updates.
The CBC was tweeted about 37,800 times with the Star getting 4,700 tweets, the CN Tower 4,500 tweets and official sponsor, CIBC, being tweeted about 3,500 times.
Overall, there were 345,000 tweets about the Pan Am Games, most of them from live events. The opening ceremony was tweeted about 42,000 times while there were 24,000 tweets on the closing ceremony. On Instagram, 79,600 pictures were tagged with #TO2015.
Baseball was the most tweeted event registering 10,800 tweets with rugby and soccer following with 6,700 and 5,200 tweets respectively.
