Today the 2011 Academy Awards ballots are due to Price Waterhouse Coopers and we noticed that Google did an Oscar watch, tracking the search queries on each film nominated. At Reform we looked this data and noticed a few things that might help accurately predict who will hold the statuette Sunday.
In looking at the graph above it seems clear that, judging on search queries, Black Swan should win on Sunday. Yet, the amount of publicity surrounding Natalie Portman due to her recent engagement and pregnancy with Benjamin Millepied made us wonder if that publicity may have affected black swan’s search queries.
As shown above, Natalie Portman dominates the Best Actress category and provides good evidence that her search queries may have affected the overall data for Best Picture. Therefore we should look at Black Swan with this graph in mind.
Next we thought about the voters themselves. Since most of the Academy currently work and/or live in Los Angeles, we limited the results to Los Angeles. This is very important since when we looked at query locations we noticed that the current leader, Black Swan, had most of it’s queries from Singapore (the United States was ranked 4th).
In looking at the top five frontrunners for Best Picture, we limited the search queries to Los Angeles and limited the search to the last 30 days. Our hypothesis is that Academy members would query the movie they are thinking about voting for, whether to watch the film again or decide between two or three films. In the short amount of time, the number of queries by members of the Academy (about 6,000 in total) should make a difference in the acceleration of queries within the 30 days.
Judging from the graphs above we see that Black Swan is significantly lower than on the overall graph at the top of the page. We can see that The Social Network has had significant spikes with overall excellent production. We’d like to immediately call it for The Social Network but the significantly high climb in interest in True Grit has us question this. Many Academy members are notorious for leaving voting late and this recent jump may be due to late voters.
The review of graphs by limiting the data to region while taking into account the outside factor (namely Ms. Portman’s recent publicity) we can say that The Social Network has the odds on chance of winning the Academy Award for Best Picture with True Grit running as a dark horse.
This demonstrates, once again, the need not only to have the correct data but to read it in a way that is the most beneficial to your goal. Looking at the initial graph, one may discern that queries are predicting Black Swan, but filtering the data and analyzing it proves something different. While both critics at The New York Times and Roger Ebert have predicted The King’s Speech as the victor, SEO for Los Angeles tells another story. We’ll see who will prove correct Sunday.
Blog posted by Matt Dorville, SEO Strategist at Reform
Tags: 2011 oscars, academy awards, data insight, movies, oscar, search predictions, search queries, social media strategy, the social network
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