INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Jared Feldman, CEO of Canvs, said he has a big goal: “I think there needs to be a Google for emotions … where you can see how people
feel about everything.”Feldman argued that creating such a product, Canvs can not only help businesses make better decisions, but also
contribute to “a more empathetic world.”(When I pointed out that not everyone is comfortable with the idea of for-profit businesses
having a detailed understanding of their emotions, particularly post-Cambridge Analytica, Feldman noted that Canvs isn’t involved in any
kind of user targeting or attempts to change user behavior — instead, it’s all about “clarifying how people really feel about
things.”)Canvs’ first product was focused on helping TV networks understanding the social media conversation about their shows, with
what Feldman said is much greater nuance than normal social sentiment analysis
Now the company is taking the next step with the launch of Canvs Surveys.Using this product, researchers collect survey data the way they
normally do, but they can then upload an Excel spreadsheet of open-ended responses and quickly get a detailed breakdown of how people
responded, in aggregate, to different characters, storylines and so on.Feldman explained that while surveys are a common research tool for
businesses, open-ended questions can be a big problem
Not only can it take an enormous amount of time to classify and tabulate all the different responses, but it also involves a degree of
subjectivity, based on how individual researchers interpret each answer.At the same time, it’s the open-ended questions that can provide
the most meaningful insights
For example, Feldman said Canvs works with NBCUniversal and found that three of the network’s pilots got similar responses when it came to
the “closed ends” (namely, the survey questions where respondents choose from a menu or numerical scale of possible answers).It was only
in the open-ended questions that you could see meaningful differences — Feldman said that ultimately, it turned out that the shows that
“overperformed for ‘enjoyment’ and underperformed for ‘interesting'” did well with viewers, while the shows that respondents saw
as more interesting than enjoyable did poorly in the ratings.Feldman argued that this is an insight that applies to companies beyond
TV.“For every single industry now, because of the Internet, because of how many choices we have, the only thing that gets people to do
something is an emotional connection,” he said
“That’s the rub.”He added that a tool like Canvs Surveys doesn’t replace the work of researchers
Instead, he argued that it reduces the “manual work” and makes them “more focused on what they’re really good at, which is insights
and storytelling.” (Plus, researchers who want to go deeper can dig into the individual responses and flag answers that weren’t
classified correctly.)It seems that NBCUniversal is happy with the results
The company’s senior director of program research Benoit Landry said in the announcement:Having just wrapped up our first pilot testing
using Canvs Surveys, I can say with confidence this isn’t an iterative improvement for the research community, it’s a first-ever
We went from spending 16 hours trying to hand sort open-ended survey responses, down to one hour with Canvs, and that’s in addition to
never-before-seen normative insights across pilots
It’s an extraordinary efficiency gain and cost savings for NBC for something we do dozens of times each year.Canvs Surveys is available
for free for researchers analyzing up to 5,000 open-ended responses.
