The Big Short to win Oscar, indepth analysis shows

A digital marketing company which has used predictive modelling to successfully forecast the past three Best Picture Oscar winners is staking its reputation once again on this year’s winner, while claiming its system would be highly beneficial to brand owners.

Exponential Interactive has analysed the web surfing habits of people with similar demographics to Oscar voters and predicts The Big Short – which tells the story of the US sub-prime mortgage crisis -will win the Best Picture Oscar, narrowly beating Spotlight. The Revenant and Room are the next most likely.

The company, which used a technique called “look-a-like modelling” to analyse the behaviour of 32,000 people working in the Los Angeles film industry with similar characteristics to Oscar voters, claims the same techniques are ideal for marketers.

Bryan Melmed, Exponential’s vice president of insights, said: “While this is a bit of fun and mainly of benefit to people who fancy a wager, it provides marketers with an important illustration of the power of look-a-like modelling to predict consumer behaviour.

“It identifies groups of people with shared interests which can be modelled against a brand’s customers to find new people who are most likely to convert. This improved targeting minimises wasted ad budgets and serves people more relevant ads, which reduces a motivation to block them.”