Whether you love or loathe the Royal Wedding hype, there is no denying that the marriage of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle will go down in history and that makes it pretty hard to ignore. You’ve probably already heard all about the bishop Michael Curry and seen a plethora of gorgeous photos, but do you know how many sat down to watch the Royal nuptials and what impact it had on the media, and on brands? No? Well we’ve got you covered.

The Facts & Stats

  • Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding drew a peak UK TV audience of 18 million, making it the country’s biggest broadcast of the year so far.
  • BBC One dominated viewership of the big day, averaging 8.7 million viewers for its five-hour special and hitting a peak audience of 13.1 million.
  • Rival ITV, which went uncharacteristically ad-free for its live broadcast, averaged 2.5 million viewers and reached a peak of 3.6m.
  • The ratings are down on the numbers that tuned in for 2011’s wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Then BBC One averaged 13.4 million viewers and a peak of 19 million and ITV enjoyed an audience of more than 5 million
  • According to Brandwatch data, the wedding was mentioned a whopping 5.2m times on Twitter on Saturday alone, with more than half (53%) of those mentions coming from the US.
  • Prince Harry outshone his bride by being mentioned nine million times, with his bride accruing just one million mentions. The Queen was mentioned 173,000 times and David Beckham was the most discussed celeb guest with 90,722 – more than any royal.
  • The nuptials considerably outshone the day’s other big match, Brandwatch found – the FA Cup final was mentioned 494,326 times on the day, and more than three-quarters of these came from overseas (US 37 per cent, UK 22 per cent, others 41 per cent).

Marks & Spencer

Not content with their commemorative tins of biscuit and proposal sandwich, Marks & Spencer’s announced, on the eve of the wedding, a royal re-brand. In celebration of Britain’s most anticipated wedding of the year, for the next three days, they became Markle and Sparkle.

KFC

To mark the big day, KFC launched a limited edition Commemorative Bucket – of course they did. Just 50 of the buckets were created and made available exclusively in KFC Windsor on the wedding day itself. According to KFC, the Royal Wedding Bucket is ‘lavish and regal in its design’, featuring a bespoke crest inspired by timeless commemorative memorabilia, but with a modern KFC twist. Featuring gold flourishes, the bucket is embellished with a classic regal crest, adorned with both British and American flags.

Tyrrells

What finer way to celebrate this wonderful Royal union than with a characterful culinary marriage of the most fragrant of spices – ginger, a dash of honey and of course, a sprinkle of sparkle, all on an impeccable parsnip crisp. Well quite.

Legoland Windsor

You can see the Royal Wedding venue from Legoland Windsor, so its hardly surprising the resort decided to celebrate the big day in their own unique way, but replicating it in LEGO.
The miniature Windsor Castle is made out of 39,960 LEGO bricks, and the scene features the Bride and Groom, The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, The Duke of Cambridge, the Duchess of Cambridge and Prince George and Princess Charlotte, plus the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and Meghan Markle’s parents. It also features a crowd of 500 and some celebrity lookalikes. The whole scene took 11 Model Makers, 752 hours to build and is made up of almost 60,000 LEGO bricks. Impressive stuff.

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