The Academy Awards Score Big with Digital Data

The Academy Awards Score Big with Digital Data

Last night, Hollywood played host to the 87th Annual Academy Awards. The show honors film’s finest–celebrating the creativity, innovation, skill and daring that entertains us all throughout the year.

In the days leading up to the ceremony, People Pattern took a look at the audience that would be watching the Academy Awards and ingested a small sample of Facebook and Twitter followers of The Academy. For each each unique user, the platform pulled the most recent 200 posts and ran the text through a set of classifiers for analysis. After a day, thousands of complex portraits reflecting an audience with diverse interests and demographics emerged from the data.

Initial insights uncovered key geographic hotspots around the country. Not surprising, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago emerged as cities with the highest concentration of fans. Perhaps a bit more interesting, the platform surfaced significant fan bases in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where a cumulative 8% of the total audience resides.

Curious to know a bit more about how these fans engaged with brands, People Pattern explored the kinds of devices and operating systems that were typical to the Academy Awards’ audience. Based on the data, we discovered that the majority of people interested in the Academy Awards were active on their mobile devices, operating mainly on iOS.

Shifting focus to the conversation surrounding the event, “Whiplash”, “Boyhood” and “Birdman” jockeyed for best in show. Top hashtags included Oscar-specific tags, as well as the British equivalent BAFTA award tag. And although “Birdman” took home the hardware, fans seemed to agree that “Whiplash” was the rightful winner.

The Academy Awards invite a commercial audience behind the scenes into world of the Hollywood celebrity, providing them multiple channels for engaging with favorite celebrities, designers, films, all ultimately benefitting the distribution companies and networks that drive the industry. With the right audience intelligence, industry heavyweights can optimize the potential of the Academy’s big night for payback extending far beyond the ceremony.

Find your company’s audience insights by requesting a demo below.