What Analytics are Important to You?
One of the first steps in our analytics process is to identify what business challenge or question you are looking to analyze, then pinpoint the metrics that can be used to build a model that would provide insight and answers to your issue. As I was watching the Emmy Awards last night, I started thinking about this process and how we can use it to predict Emmy winners (aka Emmy Analytics).
Process
Our first step, identify the business challenge or question, would yield the question – How do we predict future Emmy winners?
Second, we would need to identify the metrics that we could use to build a model that would provide insight and answers to this question.
What metrics could we use? A few that I came up with are:
- Viewership – I would assume that popular shows are more likely to produce Emmy award winners than shows that have low ratings. For this we could use Nielson Ratings and analyze historical ratings versus past winners.
- Past Winners – If an actor or show has won an Emmy in the past, does that increase the odds of the actor or show winning again? Seeing that Jim Parsons won his fourth Emmy, my assumption would be that there is a strong case for repeat winners.
- Strength of the cast and crew – How many previous winners are part of the cast (including writers, directors, etc.)? Has the show won an Emmy in the past? I compare this to a football team. Great players don’t win Super Bowls without great teams (Hello Dan Marino) and great actors don’t win awards without a great cast (Robin Williams in his last sitcom). Think Breaking Bad, the three main actors won Emmy’s and the show won the Emmy for Best Drama. Breaking Bad is a football dynasty.
- Pay – How does an actor’s pay influence their chances of winning an award? You would think that pay would indicate quality, however, from Vanity Fair:
With a $750,000-per-episode rate, Two and a Half Men star Ashton Kutcher makes five times what Game of Thrones’ Emmy-winning Tyrion Lannister—actor Peter Dinklage—earns per episode on his show ($150,000). If we want to get into more depressing minute-by-minute math, Kutcher clocks about $34,000 of income per minute of his CBS sitcom. (Calculated using 22 minutes as the typical length of a half-hour sitcom after commercials are deducted.)
Emmy Analytics
These are just a few examples, I’m sure once you got into researching each you would come up with other variables (experience, how long the show has been on TV, etc.) But after you find your metrics, I’m confident we could come up with a model that would be a statistically significant predictor of future Emmy winners.