CASE STUDY - FORTUNE 100 MEDIA COMPANY
NEXUS knew the audience better than the existing forecast
A Fortune 500 media company already had an established system for forecasting sports audiences. NEXUS reduced its prediction error by 33%.
33% less
Incumbent baseline
Aired audience
Decisions made before the audience arrives
Broadcasters make enormous commercial decisions about audiences that haven’t arrived yet. Advertising inventory is priced and sold months in advance, based on forecasts of how many people will eventually watch. Get those forecasts wrong and the consequences are real: overestimate demand and you can create make-good exposure; underestimate it and valuable inventory may be left underpriced.
A forecast with nowhere to hide
What makes this case particularly compelling is that there was already a strong incumbent to beat. The company had an established forecasting process and a locked pre-season baseline. NEXUS independently predicted the same broadcast audiences, and a backtest against the season that had already aired left nowhere for either forecast to hide: both could be compared directly against what actually happened.
Incumbent
Forecast locked before the season
NEXUS
Forecast independently generated
Ground truth
Actual audiences as broadcasts aired
Before the season aired
33%
less prediction error than the existing forecasting baseline
Backtested week by week against the audiences that actually aired, NEXUS tracked them substantially more accurately than the company’s incumbent forecast. The chart below makes this particularly tangible: the locked baseline, NEXUS forecast and actual aired audience can be seen diverging and converging as the season progresses.
NEXUS app — weekly audience trajectory vs. locked baseline and actual
The money has already moved.
For a broadcaster, better audience prediction flows directly into the economics of the business. It creates better information for pricing inventory, making advertiser commitments, spotting where audiences may be over or underestimated, and managing the risk between what gets sold and what ultimately gets delivered.
The audience hasn’t arrived yet. The money has already moved. That’s why predicting it better matters.
