These last 4 were “thumb in the air” guesses to be totally honest. Analytics got me partly there, my gut got me really close!<\/div>\n

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My final prediction\/guess was $247,575,500. Less than 1% from the actual weekend opening draw.<\/strong><\/div>\n
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Considering the small sample size I had to work with of data, and the selective nature I used to create my data set, I got lucky. But the predictive\/what-if piece of the analysis is really what got me close. My thumb in the air variables were pure gut instinct, but being able to model the potential future was an important factor in getting me to my final entry.<\/div>\n
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Boiled down, it was basic BI:<\/div>\n
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What did the franchise do in the past?<\/li>\n
What have competitors and others in the industry done recently?<\/li>\n
What marketing\/awareness efforts are in place and how effective are they?<\/li>\n
What does the customer’s sphere of influence look like?<\/li>\n
What does brand strength do to the bottom line?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Is there a lesson here? Probably not, but it reaffirms to me that sometime when we try to over complicate things we can lose sight of what is real. Keep it simple, trust the numbers and let people apply their gut.<\/div>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So earlier this year I entered an analytics contest and I won! TDWI sponsored the contest, using analytics, to predict the opening weekend for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. HUGE, was not an acceptable answer, so I started to formulate how one would predict such a widely variable number. Here was my thought process, based on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":250,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[121,1],"tags":[40,110,9],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbradbourne.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbradbourne.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbradbourne.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbradbourne.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbradbourne.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbradbourne.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":910,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbradbourne.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786\/revisions\/910"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbradbourne.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbradbourne.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbradbourne.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbradbourne.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}