As the Founder and CEO of Canvs, a technology platform
created to measure and interpret emotions, Jared Feldman understands and
champions how emotional investment is valuable within the marketplace. New York
City-based Canvs, which launched in public beta in April 2014 and officially
into the marketplace in December 2014, has, according to Feldman, “become the
industry standard for measuring audience reactions at scale through analysis of
real-time Twitter data.”
He got his start in the industry as a NYU student and while
there met his now-partner Dr. Sam Hui. Upon graduation, the two formed Mashwork,
which culled actionable insights for media clients. Canvs which grew out of
Mashwork, has been experiencing great strides in recent months, including
announcing their Series A funding and their recent partnership with Viacom.
In this interview, Feldman talks about the impact of certain
emotions on content success and by genre and the future of traditional research
in an age of emotion tech.
Charlene Weisler: What social media data do you use in Canvs?
Jared Feldman: Canvs
receives its Twitter data from Nielsen, which captures relevant Tweets about
original video programming from TV and over-the-top streaming providers for
linear airtimes as well as on a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week basis.
Analyzing those Twitter feeds from Nielsen, Canvs maps the emotional resonance
of audience reactions online to first-run TV shows. Canvs then displays unique
qualitative views showing the emotionality surrounding specific characters,
plotlines and moments — mapping the emotionally charged reactions to 56 unique
emotion categories including “love,” “dislike,” “annoying,” “beautiful,”
“boring” and more. We just launched our own Facebook analysis capabilities
where we summarized on an emotional basis all comments on video and the
reaction to content. It is not a matter of measuring, for example, the number
of tweets. We function to show what those tweets are all about – why emotions
behind the social activity are so important. An emotional audience has greater
recall and engagement. We can measure, by the use of emotional measurement, which
ads were most engaging.
Charlene: This is different from traditional research methodologies.
Jared: Yes. The only way to measure engagement and attention
historically has been through focus groups. But it is time consuming and
expensive and difficult to measure the emotional tenor of the audience.
Charlene: How do you measure an emotion like irony?
Jared: Irony falls into a bucket of emotions that require
humans to review and measure. The methodology we use to measure emotions
requires both science and judgement. You can’t rely on computers alone. But
having a room of people judging doesn’t work either. We do not measure on
sentiment – there are no positive or negative metrics. We have identified 56
common ways to express how people feel including love, shocked and crazy. But
there is a lot of unstructured text, text that is not grammatically correct.
Sometimes people do not use real words — words like ‘on fleak’ or ‘bae’ are
commonly used by Millennials. These words are not picked or properly categorized
by sentiment research. We built words and phrases that denote emotions. And we
have recently included amplifiers and emojis. In the case of irony or sarcasm,
a post like, “Man, I looove that show” with a thumbs down emoji can trip up
algorithms. This is way we use a combination of efforts including machine
learning with state-of-the-art language processing. We use humans to calibrate
irony, sarcasm, jargon and misspelling, etc.
Charlene: Collecting audiences by emotions instead of demo groups is a
departure from standard media measurement.
Jared: Yes. We organize the world by common feeling – if we
feel the same, we are the same beyond the demographics. How we feel affects
what we do.
Charlene: What are the most predictive or important emotions?
Jared: It varies by genre. Any emotion in comedy means that
the audience will come back next week. In Reality shows, it is ‘excitement.’ Our
methodology was used by MAGNA to predict programs that would be renewed or
picked up for a full season. We had an 85% accuracy rate in predicting shows
that would be renewed or picked up. This is extremely exciting to us because it
means that the reactions on Canvs are representative of the overall audience.
Charlene: You mentioned the emotion “crazy”. What is that?
Jared: It is part of the colorful language that exists on
social media and is neither positive nor negative. It includes exasperation and
implicit excitement – OMG or That Is So Nuts. What’s
interesting is that within drama programs, ‘crazy’ and ‘love’ are the two
emotions that had the strongest correlation within loyal Tweeting behaviors.
More specifically, a 10% increase in the share of ‘crazy’ among the total
numbers of reactions which could reflect a jump from low to high ‘crazy’ for a given program. It’s important to understand
why this is. In scripted drama, “crazy” is an indication of ratings because
there is a heightened sense of investment. It is a strong indicator for us.
Charlene: Does emotional measurement replace the standard demographic
measures?
Jared: There is still a place for demographics, but
demographics as we know them will evolve. They’ll become more actionable over
time. For example, rather than prioritizing where a person lives or what income
bracket they’re in, researchers will ask: What do they find funny or crazy? Aligning
viewers to core emotions will take precedence.
Charlene: Will a service like Canvs replace traditional research?
Jared: Traditional research will continue to bleed but will
never go away. Soliciting responses will always have a place. However, we’ve
always been bound by what people are willing to speak about and speak freely
about. That’s one of the main reasons why traditional research can’t continue
to compete with a qualitative technology platform like Canvs. Because, we’re
capturing how people feel when they’re less inclined to be as guarded as they
would in focus groups. If there’s one thing that’s clear, it’s that innovation has
never been more important. Social media will become more of a social science.
It has never been actionable before on the qualitative side but as deeper and
more sophisticated technologies in this space continue to evolve Canvs will
definitely be at the forefront of this space.
This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com
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