With all the talk about cord-cutting these days, it can be hard to truly understand audience behavior when it comes to TV. So we worked with emotion measurement company Canvs to uncover insights about how one subset of over-the-top viewers—Hulu subscribers—are consuming regular TV programming. (Note: An Emotional Reaction is defined as a tweet related to TV programming that contains an emotion as determined by Canvs semantic analysis technology.)

The main question we wanted to explore: Given all the non-linear TV viewing options Hulu subscribers have—including, most notably, Hulu’s Emmy-winning original drama The Handmaid’s Tale—do they end up watching fewer shows from so-called traditional programmers?

The short answer: Nope. Canvs took a close look at a random sample of viewers who expressed emotions (in the form of Emotional Reactions, or ERs) about The Handmaid's Tale on Twitter from Jan. 1, 2017 through Jan. 1, 2018. That group of highly engaged THT viewers, it turns out, also Emotionally Reacted to 8,853 individual TV airings, across 286 original series, a grand total of 47,578 times during the same measurement window.

Related: Hulu Surpasses 800K Live TV Subscribers

“Hulu subscribers are voracious consumers of content, no matter where it comes from. This manner of consumption behavior from subscribers pairs quite nicely with the brand’s fan-first market positioning,” said Stuart Schwartzapfel, chief strategy officer at Canvs. “Essentially, Hulu’s subscribers are backing up the company’s branding efforts, which is not an easy thing to do.”

By way of comparison, Canvs also took a look at a random sample of viewers (again, over the same time period) who expressed emotions about American Horror Story—the original series from basic-cable mainstay FX—and found that those viewers consumed 13% less airings compared to The Handmaid's Tale sample audience.

Another finding of the Canvs study: Hulu subscribers are incredibly engaged with live programming: The Handmaid's Tale audience sample skewed dramatically toward live TV in terms of other programming they were Emotionally Reacting to—with news and talk shows that aired during early and late-fringe dayparts showing particularly high emotional resonance with THT viewers.

Also worth noting: The average Twitter follower count of people in The Handmaid's Tale sample audience (N=1,000) was 76,103, besting that of American Horror Story, Scandal and This Is Us combined.

The bottom line: While some may presume that consumers who take advantage of over-the-top TV options are trying to avoid traditional TV programming, that doesn’t seem to be the case with Hulu subscribers, now 20 million strong.

In fact, the streaming service’s brand positioning—which includes its ongoing campaign tagline “Come TV with us,” as well as “TV come true”—seems to be entirely in sync with how its customers actually feel about traditional TV: They’re definitely not trying to avoid it—they just want to watch it (a lot of it) on their own terms.

Research company Canvs is adding Instagram to the social media it studies to gauge emotional responses among viewers for its TV programming and advertising clients.

Canvs also said it has figured out how to read and analyze emojis, giving it extra insights into what young Generation Z consumers are feeling. Harnessing that information about emotional responses has proved powerful in predicting program ratings and commercial recall.

Adding the fast growing social-media platform to the company’s current data from Twitter and Facebook provides clients with a more balanced look at social media activity, Stuart Schwartzapfel, Canvs chief strategy officer, said.

Much of Instagram’s content is visual, making it more difficult to quantify and analyze posts than on Facebook or Twitter.

“It is heavily visual, but there is a scalable amount of commentary, either in the form of rich text or emoji usage that we’re seeing as pretty scalable on Instagram,” Schwartzapfel says.

Canvs found that about half of the messages on brand pages — including those of TV networks — include emojis, making understanding them imperative.

Canvs’s data science team did a study across Instagram and social media at large to understand which emojis are most prevalent, and it identified 1,000 emojis that are most commonly used.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

Canvs, a startup that uses Twitter and other social networking data to help media and programming partners get a fix on the emotions of their viewing audiences, has added Turner to its growing base of clients.

Under an agreement announced Tuesday, Turner will tap Canvs’s technology platform to support Launchpad, a new social insights tool that will help Turner create and launch content for social media outlets. Turner said it has executed more than a dozen Launchpad campaigns in areas categories such as technology, movie studios and gaming.

Canvs said its platform, which maps audience reactions to 56 “emotion categories” such as “love,” “funny” and “exciting,” will help Turner “identify groups of like-minded users,” sort them out by topics they care about, and then deliver content that resonates with those groups.

Canvs, which recently locked in a $5.6 million “A” round led by KEC Ventures, said the Turner deal comes on the heels of its new “emotional connection analytics” system that gives Turner and other media companies a real-time look at how branded content is performing and resonating with viewers. The agreement also comes into play after Canvs recently introduced analytics products for Facebook and YouTube channels.

"We've cracked the nut on viewer emotionality surrounding content, and we're glad Turner sees the value in leveraging Canvs insights to deliver content and facilitate brand experiences that viewers welcome," Jared Feldman, Canvs’s founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Leveraging real-time Emotional Reactions will help Turner’s brand partners identify and market to groups of like-minded fans when they’re still emotionally-charged and rallied around a particular topic or piece of content.”

"When people are emotionally involved with content they are more inclined to share it on social media," added Frank Kavilanz, vice president of social, Turner Ignite. “By aligning with Canvs, we gain deeper understanding of the moments that trigger emotional reaction, providing our team the insight to react and promote branded content to the right audiences and unlock the full potential of a client’s social campaign."

Canvs’s other known partners and customers include NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, Fox, HBO, Viacom, Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency.

Commercials are more likely to be recalled when they appear in TV shows that provoke an emotional response, according to a new study.

The study looked at viewers' reactions to shows on Twitter and when their tweets contained emotional responses to a show, as measured by research company Canvs, those viewers were 48% more likely to recall an ad than viewers who watched programs that drew less of a reaction.

The takeaway from the study is that buyers should find programming that resonates emotionally with the target audience. Twitter’s pitch is that it can be used as a tool to align campaigns with the appropriate shows.

Read more at B&C. 

Big Data. This there anything it can't do? 

By now, we’ve pretty much had our fill of which ads from Super Bowl 50 received the most attention during the big game, but  Canvs has mined social networking data to reveal how viewers felt about those super-expensive spots.

Canvs, the New York-based startup that uses Twitter data captured by Nielsen (the game generated nearly 17 million tweets and nearly 4.5 million “emotional reactions”), said it has analyzed that info around those Super Bowl spots, enabling it to interpret the emotional response of the TV viewing audience.

Through an analysis that applied 56 different emotions to its post-Super Bowl study, Canvs found that Mountain Dew’s strangePuppyMonkeyBaby ad came away with the highest rate of “crazy” reactions (38.5%), edging out Beyonce’s “Formation World Tour” (28.6%).

The ad that drew the most reactions across all emotions was Doritos’s “Ultrasound” spot (38,823 reactions out of 85,736 tweets – 34% of them loved the spot, and 48% found it to be funny.). Doritos’s spot also came away with the most “funny” reactions (18,489), soundly beating out T-Mobile’s “You Got Carriered” ad (9,553 “funny” reactions).

However, T-Mobile’s ad got the most “love,” generating 17,450 such reactions, ahead of Doritos (13,056 “love” reactions), Esurance (11,110), Heinz’s “Weiner Stampede” (7,344) and the NFL’s “Super Babies Choir” (7,083).

But does any of data actually mean anything? Canvs believes that it does, because it shines some emotional light that can’t be culled from more traditional viewing metrics. As company  CEO Jared Feldman explained to me earlier, an audience that is emotionally charged is more likely to remember or be more receptive to a commercial.

And advertising is just one part of it. Canvs, a bit more flush following a $5.6 million “A” round, believes its analysis provides valuable insight into how the audience feels about TV shows, and provides  valuable feedback for producers and  writers as they maintain and tweak story lines.

Perhaps the same could be said for marketers, which no doubt are already thinking about what kind of advertising magic they can conjure up for next year’s big game.

VH1 is giving viewers a new way to tap into social media to discover what they loved and hated about original series Hit the Floor through a tech partnership with Canvs and Telescope.

Billed as a “Best of Social” experience, the social tilt lets fans share their emotional connections with the characters and the show, which airs Mondays at 10/9c.

VH1 booted up the social platform/widget tonight on the Web, featuring sharable content and stats and Tweets collected from last night’s episode. Fans of the show can share those “moments” as gifs, memes or as emotionally-charged tweets. VH1 said it will update that data each week following a new episode of the drama series that follows an fictitious NBA cheerleading/dance team called the Los Angeles Devil Girls. The series delivered 1.7 million total viewers in its season three debut last month.

VH1 said the socially-driven platform for Hit the Floor was developed and designed by Telescope, a company focused on real-time audience and consumer engagement technology. Also tied in is Canvs, a New York-based startup that recently raised a $5.6 million “A” round, uses Twitter data captured by Nielsen to help its partners interpret the tone and emotion of the TV viewing audience. NBCU, Sony Pictures, Fox, HBO, and Viacom are among its known partners.

"We wanted to find an innovative way to aggregate like-minded commentary from our 'Hit The Floor' fans - a very passionate, and vocal community on Twitter," said Dave Perry, VP of future TV & cross-platform innovation at VH1, in a statement.  "We use Canvs across our programs, and find it incredibly valuable - so we wanted to bring the power of its emotion-driven data to our viewers in a meaningful and unique way. By partnering with Canvs and Telescope to build this activation, 'Hit the Floor' fans can now find the craziest, hottest, and most OMG comments and moments and easily share them with their friends."

Canvs, a New York-based startup that uses Twitter data to help its partners interpret the emotions of the TV viewing audience, has raised a $5.6 million “A” round led by KEC Ventures.

Rubicon Venture Capital, Gary Vaynerchuck and BRaVe Ventures, Social Starts, and Milestone Venture Partners also participated in the round. Canvs said the fresh funds are tagged to fuel product development and growth.

While ratings tell part of the story (how many viewers are tuning in), Canvs aims to go deeper by mining and analyzing social TV data to help its partners understand how a TV show is resonating with viewers. How do those shows make them feel from moment to moment? What’s the emotional temperature of the audience? Are they excited? Mad? Sad? Amused? Zoning out? Do they love or hate a newly introduced character?

Canvs, explains company cofounder and CEO Jared Feldman, uses social TV data to illustrate “how fans are connecting with [a show] emotionally…No one is measuring excitement.”

Canvs, which uses Twitter data captured by Nielsen relevant to TV programming, claims its platform can get a fix on the emotional responses and tone of the audience, filtering and sifting through data based on how people actual “speak” on social media using expressions (WTF?, OMG!, “on fleek”)  that don’t necessarily directly convey how a computer would determine if viewers loved or hated about a show or what’s happening during a show.

“It’s important that there’s data parity, and that we’re speaking the same language as the viewer,” he said. “We’re very millennials focused.”

Canvs then maps those reactions to 56 emotion-based categories, such as love, dislike, annoying, beautiful, and boring. The company believes that such information, when presented and illustrated in Canvs’s Web-driven dashboard, provides valuable feedback for producers and  writers as they maintain and tweak story lines based, for example. And there’s an advertising angle -- the belief that an audience that is emotionally charged is more likely to remember or be more receptive to spots that run during a show.

Canvs is a subscription-based, syndicated platform that currently specializes in analyzing traditional first-run TV shows. Feldman said Canvs will also expand into over-the-top video later this year.

Canvs’s partners and customers include NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, Fox, HBO, Viacom, Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency, among others.

More detail about Canvs and its technology/service will be featured in the January 25 edition of Next TV, a weekly section that runs in Multichannel News and Broadcasting & Cable.