NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Viacom Velocity, Viacom’s (NASDAQ: VIAB, VIA) integrated marketing and creative content team, today announced a partnership with Canvs, the technology platform that measures and interprets emotionality in language. The alliance provides an unprecedented advantage to Velocity’s clients by measuring consumers’ emotional reactions to marketing campaigns.
Velocity’s updated Echo Social Graph product (“Echo 2.0.”), Viacom’s proprietary tool that measures the effectiveness and virality of custom creative marketing campaigns, will integrate Canvs’ emotional analysis to deliver deeper insights to marketing partners about the consumer impact of a campaign. Canvs’ sophisticated capability tracks a broad range of 56 unique emotions, which is a huge increase over the three general feelings – “positive-negative-neutral” – typically tracked by sentiment analysis. Additionally, Canvs’ extensive database is uniquely keyed into millennial slang and social media language.
Until now, Canvs has focused mostly on translating audience feelings about television shows, but Echo Social Graph’s advanced capability to track social media conversations for clients across five platforms –Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, and Instagram – opens new ways to utilize Canvs.
“Viacom’s Echo Social Graph has already been providing clients a unique advantage in measuring social media campaigns by mining data on five social media platforms,” said Lydia Daly, Vice President of Viacom Velocity. “Layering Canvs' analytics into Echo 2.0 deepens the insights we provide our clients like no one else can in the industry, and our team uses this information to ensure that we deliver our partners’ brand messages with maximum effectiveness. Finding the most innovative ways to connect creativity and data science is what keeps us - and our clients - ahead.”
Canvs’ capabilities are especially notable for deciphering millennial jargon, such as “Bae” and “on fleek,” as well as translate words that have double meaning, such as “sick.” Canvs' depth of interpretation means it keys into language nuances, like finding “love” expressed 30,000 ways on social media.
Echo 2.0 will tap into Canvs’ sophisticated database of millions of pop culture words and phrases, which accounts for misspellings to ensure accuracy in interpreting feelings as millennials intend them. “Trippy,” “awkward,” “boring,” “enough said,” “goosebumps,” “guilty pleasure,” and “mindblown” are among the 56 feelings interpreted by Canvs.
“Our partnership with the Echo Social Graph now enables advertisers to tap into the power of emotions to inform client’s marketing, research, and advertising decisions,” said Jared Feldman, founder and chief executive at Canvs. “Viacom has helped define culture for decades, and we are honored to help its advertisers understand its audiences with a level of nuance and speed that has not been previously possible.”
The partnership will be unveiled this month at Viacom Velocity’s third annual “Roadshow,” which introduces new products and capabilities to the marketing community ahead of the Upfront season. The Roadshow, which travels to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, will be hosted this year by Michael Ian Black of Comedy Central’s “Another Period.”
ABOUT VIACOM
Viacom is home to premier global media brands that create compelling television programs, motion pictures, short-form content, apps, games, consumer products, social media experiences, and other entertainment content for audiences in 180 countries. Viacom's media networks, including Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV, VH1, Spike, BET, CMT, TV Land, Nick at Nite, Nick Jr., Channel 5 (UK), Logo, Nicktoons, TeenNick and Paramount Channel, reach a cumulative 3.4 billion television subscribers worldwide. Paramount Pictures is a major global producer and distributor of filmed entertainment.
For more information about Viacom and its businesses, visit www.viacom.com. Keep up with Viacom news by following Viacom's blog at blog.viacom.com and Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/viacom.
ABOUT CANVS
Canvs is a technology platform created to measure and interpret emotions. The company’s proprietary social language interpreter technology understands millions of words used that are not yet formally defined or recognized anywhere else. Currently focused on first-run television, and working with Sony Pictures, SMG, NBCU, Viacom and more, Canvs maps the emotional resonance of specific characters, plotlines and moments — mapping the emotionally charged reactions to 56 unique emotion categories including “love,” “dislike,” “annoying,” “beautiful,” “boring” and more. Built using social media listening research from MSI Young Marketing Scholar, Professor Sam Hui, Ph.D and Jared Feldman, Canvs receives its Twitter data from Nielsen, which captures relevant Tweets from three hours before, during, and three hours after an episode's initial broadcast, local time. For more information, visit www.canvs.tv.
