Levers Hollywood to Predict Box Office Sales

Popcorn and movies
Arizona-based digital marketing firm Vuurr has launched into the realm of data prediction with their latest platform, Levers. Levers Feeds, one of two products within Levers, allows customers to sync cost and conversion data from paid sources to an analytics destination like Google AdWords, bing Ads, Google Analytics, and mixpanel. All Feeds automatically update data and calculate business metrics like ROI, revenue and cost-per-action. The other product, Simulations, allows companies to test changes in budgets, bids and conversation rates, allowing maximum utilization of return and greater strategy planning.
Levers Hollywood was built-in 32 hours at Hollywood Hack Day as an experiment. It predicts opening weekend box office revenue for new movies based on a massive combined database from sources like IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, and more. Levers Hollywood combines the “L-Score,” the quantified value of a cast or crew member’s contribution to the revenue, and the “Topsy Score,” the social media buzz surrounding the release, to predict how well the movie will do on its opening weekend. As of today, the Hollywood product will not be moving forward, but you never know what Levers will think up next.
I spoke with co-founder Chris Conrey about Levers’ methodology and their recent success at Hollywood Hack Day 2013.
Tell me about Levers and the problem you are trying to solve.
The idea for Levers came from recognizing the same issues that kept arising for our clients at Vuurr. We had created a number of spreadsheets and systems to solve these problems internally, but recognized that we would need a more repeatable process to be more efficient. The more time we spent researching existing tools in this space and thinking about it, we realized that this was more valuable as a product for others to use than as an internal tool for our consulting services. That’s when we began to productize it. [That] first led to Connectalytics, which we have now improved and absorbed into what is currently Levers.
As someone responsible for managing a marketing budget it’s not always obvious where the most profitable place is to spend your limited time and budget. There are a lot of factors responsible for obtaining or losing conversions – Levers Simulations empowers customers to test marketing data with their own historical data to accurately predict the outcome of that scenario. Combining the highest yielding simulations that improve ROI between PPC, SEO and social media.
Can you explain how the site gets all of the data?
Currently all data comes from users authorizing their data sources, where Google Ad words and Bing Ads are the two sources right now. The data comes in and flows through to one of two destinations, currently Google Analytics and Mixpanel. More Feed destinations and sources are in the pipeline as well as the Simulations product, which is in private beta. Simulations will use the same data for its projections.
How do you fund the product?
To date, we’ve funded Levers completely with the profits from our consulting company Vuurr. The consulting business is strong and provides us with the ability to constantly hone our techniques and the Levers product with real customer data.

Lever team at Hollywood Hack Day
Lever team at Hollywood Hack Day

I understand you participated in Hollywood Hack Day and did well.
We had participated in last year’s Hollywood Hack Day as a fun experiment to step outside of our normal work time; [we won] fourth place. This year we placed second out of thirty-six teams with what we called Levers Hollywood, which accurately predicts opening box office weekend revenues.
What’s next for Levers?
Simulations is the next phase for Levers and, more importantly, the paramount advantage for our customers. Simulations will allow visual analysis of changes to marketing data and their potential impact on KPI goals before said changes are made. Customers can then develop more educated, data-driven strategies ultimately saving time and money while increasing revenues.
Anything else you’d like the readers to know?
The Levers team recently opened a San Francisco office to support some of our clients in Silicon Valley, but continues to maintain our HQ at Gangplank in Chandler as we continue to build both Vuurr and Levers into powerhouses.
For more information on Levers, click here.
For more information on Levers Hollywood, click here.
For more information on Vuurr, click here.