Digital advertising specialists Exponential Interactive, who have successfully predicted the Best Picture Academy Award winner for the last three years, have unveiled their pick for this weekend’s Oscars.
Exponential have revealed that they predict that ensemble drama/ comedy The Big Short is their favourite to win the prestigious award, narrowly beating the acclaimed Spotlight. The company have been analysing web surfing habits of people with similar demographics to Oscar voters. They successfully predict Oscar winners using a technique called “look-a-like modelling” which analyses the behaviour of 32,000 people working in the Los Angeles Film industry with similar characteristics to Oscar voters. They’re from a very narrow demographic group say the Los Angeles Times – 94% Caucasian, 77% male, average age 62.
The Big Short
“We know the typical Oscar voter is a frequent traveller, invests heavily in home theatre systems, follows tennis and baseball, is concerned about privacy and Social Security, buys expensive watches, and drives a European luxury car,” explains Bryan Melmed, Exponential’s VP of Insights. “Thus, the film interests of people with similar interests give us a strong clue as to where votes would go.”
Melmed says: “This left The Big Short and Spotlight but it was incredibly difficult to predict the winner as these two have the strongest overlapping audiences, sharing 95% of the 10,000+ behavioural indicators we identified. However, The Big Short edged it on mirroring the key interests of Oscar voters.”
Here’s how they ranked the nominees.
- The Big Short
- Spotlight
- The Revenant
- Room
- Mad Max: Fury Road
- The Martian
- Bridge Of Spies
- Brooklyn
Brooklyn, the company said, looking at their data, has the smallest chance of taking the gong. Their analysis shows that the people identified are not big film fans, prefer TV – 80x more likely than average to watch Downtown Abbey. So, why did the others fall short? Well, take Bridge of Spies, the Steven Spielberg directed true story set during World War II. Exponential say that the film’s fan base is too conservative, while Mad Max and The Martian fans are too young and diverse. Room‘s audience doesn’t show a strong male skew, and women make up a large portion. The Revenant‘s fan base is too diverse, conservative and religious, so says the company.
“The 2016 prediction has been the hardest by far due to the fact that increased attention and the politicisation of the process adds noise to the data and makes voting patterns less predictable,” concludes Melmed. “A more diverse voting system – which would favour The Revenant this year – would be welcomed by all but it makes prediction more difficult, so this is probably the last year we can use this approach.”
The Academy Awards are dished out in Hollywood on Sunday evening.
