Covid-19 Daily Bulletin 12/05: Drone-Filled Skies and Tie-dye

Is that a bird? Is that a plane?

Welcome back. Today we’re talking about horror films, drones, and DIY tie-dye.

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Take to the skies

It’s time to take another look at a hobby that’s seen a surge in interest under the pandemic.

With lockdowns keeping people indoors, you might think people’s interest in drones would be on hold. In fact, we’ve found the opposite.

The above chart shows social media posts people have made about their own drones, plus posts to three drone-based subreddits. Generally this conversation stayed pretty level in 2019, bar some spikes from a few popular Reddit posts and a seasonal jump over Christmas and the New Year.

It seemed like 2020 would follow a similar pattern with January and February fairly flat (although up on 2019 numbers). But then we start to see a rise, beginning right at the start of March and continuing up till now.

The early rise can mostly be attributed to Reddit posts. Something about social distancing and possible lockdowns obviously spurred people’s interest. For example, one thread asked about using drones to help with their shopping.

By the end of March, posts from people talking specifically about their own drones increased too, presumably as new drones arrived in the mail. This tallies with Google Trends data showing ‘buy drone’ searches rising at the same time.

The trend hasn’t shown signs of slowing yet. As lockdowns are eased and the weather improves, we might see more people’s drones in the skies than ever before. In the meantime, be sure to check out /r/drone_photography for some incredible images of the world in lockdown.

Socially distanced scares

Escapism doesn’t always mean light-hearted comedies or epic fantasies. For example, as Covid-19 spread around the world, interest in tabletop game Pandemic skyrocketed.

We wondered if people were turning away from the horrors of the real world to ones of fiction. To find out, we looked at r/horror, a huge Reddit community of 1.6m users, to see how activity had changed.

There’s been a very clear uptick in posts to the subreddit recently. We can see this starts to begin in March, but really shows in April and it looks to be continuing into May, too. By May 11 last year, 5,400 people had posted to the subreddit. That’s up by 40% to 7,700 this year.

Movies are the topic of choice by far. Of the 28k people who’ve posted to the subreddit since March, 14k were about horror flicks. In comparison, 5k talked about books, and another 4k mentioned television shows.

Clearly there’s an appetite for the darker side of entertainment right now. For anyone planning future productions that are inspired by current events, this could be great news.

Viva la tie-dye!

Tie-dye: you either love it or hate it. And in recent weeks, thanks to the pandemic and resulting lockdown, it’s making a huge comeback.

Using our Consumer Research platform, we found the number of English-language discussions of DIY tie-dye increased by 74% in March and April, compared to January and February.

Search data echoes the same popularity increase, with tie-dye searches peaking in April. The number of searches this year have even soared about festival season 2019.

And according to BuzzSumo, engagement with articles around tie-dye were up 348% in March and April, compared to January and February. ‘How to’ guides are the most popular kind of content, with YouTube being the most popular platform for them.

This surge in interest has been driven by the coronavirus outbreak. With Consumer Research, we found 7k people posting about revamping their clothes in March and April because they wanted something to do. To be fair, it does look like a lot of fun.

Social authors are loving customizing their outfits, with shirts being the hottest item to dye (43k mentions in March and April). Socks came a distant second with 8k mentions, followed by dresses with 6k.

We also found pink to be the most popular color with 4.6k mentions, and rainbow came in second at 3k.

There are small drops of joy during these hard times. It’s fantastic to see people thinking outside of the box to entertain themselves with projects like this. Keep an eye out for retro DIY projects going viral because, as we eagerly await the reopening of civilization, we can expect more of these funky trends to emerge.

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Thanks for reading

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Stay safe,

Brandwatch Response Team

Digital Consumer Intelligence

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