Brandwatch Bulletin #67: Cicadas, Awe, and Anger

Natural wonder or nightmare?

Welcome back from the weekend. Today we’re looking at a major natural event involving creepy-crawlies, which caused much awe and anger.

Let’s get to it.

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The cicada conversation

For those unaware of cicadas, we’ll quickly explain the key details. They’re insects that live in groups called broods. Broods emerge from the ground all at once, and each brood emerges regularly at either 13 or 17 year intervals. This year in the US, it was Brood X’s turn, and they’re a big brood.

Using Brandwatch Consumer Research, we can look for people talking about cicadas and match peaks to the emergence times of different broods.

Like we said, Brood X is a big one. According to Wikipedia, it has “the greatest range and concentration of any of the 17-year cicadas” with the brood’s bugs appearing in 15 US states.

That’s clearly reflected in our data, with cicada mentions in 2021 dwarfing all of the previous years we can track. There were so many cicadas around, they even grounded President Biden’s press plane by gumming up the engines.

The abundance of insects even sparked talk about eating them. According to Google Trends, one of the biggest breakout search terms relating to the insects was “cicadas recipes”, with Wired specifically calling on people to chow down on the critters.

The emergence of Brood X generated a lot of coverage (not just about eating the bugs). According to BuzzSumo, 14k articles were published about cicadas in 2021, receiving 4.2m social engagements in the process.

Looking more closely at the May to June period, the Facebook reactions to these pieces were mostly positive as billions of insects crawled out of the ground.

Of course, reading about cicadas on Facebook is a very different experience to being in physical proximity to them.

This became clear when we looked back at our Brandwatch Consumer Research data.

In May 2021, when the brood had yet to emerge, or had only emerged in a few places, joy was the top emotion as people got excited about this major biological event. But once we reached June, when the full effects of the cicada swarms were felt, joy dropped and anger took the top spot.

For anyone traumatized by Brood X, we have good and bad news. The good news is that there won’t be another emergence of cicadas until 2024. The bad news? Two broods, one 13 year one, and another 17 year one, will emerge at once. At least you’ve got time to move.

What should we cover next?

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Thanks for reading

That’s it for today, but we’ll be on Monday. If you were forwarded this email and want in on the action, get subscribed to the Brandwatch Bulletin now.

Stay safe,

The Brandwatch React team

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