Case Study: NBC predicts pilot viewership and uncovers emotional insights with Canvs Surveys

NBC Relies on Canvs Surveys to Get the Full Story During Pilot Season

NBC turned to Canvs and its Canvs Surveys product to solve a core research problem during the hectic pilot season: how to measure viewers’ emotional reactions quickly and at scale. With hundreds of new series competing for attention and close-ended questions missing nuance, NBC needed a way to extract reliable emotional insight from open-ended responses to predict which pilots would build deep viewer connections.

Canvs processed NBC’s open-ended survey responses with its NLP engine to quantify Emotional Reactions and Drivers, benchmarked results against NBC drama norms, and surfaced differences between three pilot dramas within minutes. Canvs’ Emotion Graph helped NBC allocate advertising and accurately predicted Drama #3’s superior performance (Drama #1: 3.6M premiere / ~2.2M season avg; Drama #2: 7.5M / ~3.0M; Drama #3: 10.1M / ~3.7M), while saving NBC more than 15 hours of analysis time per survey.

NBC