Nik Nanos
Nik Nanos (born in 1964 as Nikita James Nanos) is a Canadian public opinion pollster, entrepreneur, public speaker, author, expert in political, business and social trends.
Early life and education
The son of Greek immigrants, he grew up in Trenton[1] Ontario, Canada attending Dufferin Public School and Prince Charles Public School with one year at Trenton High School. With the sudden death of his father,[2] he moved to Oshawa Ontario and attended O’Neill Collegiate and Vocational Institute where he was the Poet Laureate in his final year of high school. He attended Queen's University in Kingston Ontario.
He founded SES Canada Research Inc., the precursor of Nanos Research as an undergraduate student at Queen’s University.[3] While at Queen’s he was President of the Queen’s Debating Union and represented Queen’s in Canada,[4] the United States, and at the National and World Debating Championships[5] for extemporaneous parliamentary debating.
Nik Nanos has undergraduate degrees in history and political studies and a Master of Business Administration from Queen's University in Canada. His training includes PhD level studies[6] at the University of Nottingham School of Politics and International Relations in the United Kingdom. He is a Research Associate Professor[7] at the State University of New York at Buffalo specializing in US-Canada relations, a Global Fellow[8] at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC doing research on populism and energy politics, and a Senior Fellow[9] at the University of Ottawa’s Collaboratory on Energy Research and Policy. Nik has also been elected a Fellow[10] of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, the highest professional designation in the marketing research industry in Canada and holds a Certified Management Consulting (CMC) designation.[11]
Career
Nik Nanos is Chairman of the Nanos Research Group of Companies and is business partners with his brother John Nanos[12] who is also a graduate of Queen’s University.
At the beginning of his career the firm conducted a controversial riding survey[13] that predicted that Peter Milliken (later to become the Speaker of the House of Commons of Canada), a relatively unknown Liberal federal candidate in the riding of Kingston and the Islands would defeat senior Progressive Conservative Cabinet Minister Flora Macdonald in the 1988 Canadian Federal Election. He also pioneered publicly released nightly election tracking in 2004 with the Cable Public Affairs Channel and has conducted nightly tracking in every federal election in Canada since that time. In the 2006 election his results were within one tenth of one percent for all the major parties – a first in Canadian polling history.[14]
The Nanos Research Group of Companies includes Signal Leadership Communications,[15] a social public relations firm specializing in issues and image management in a digitally disrupted era. It also includes Nanos-dimap Analytika, an analytics and targeting research practice, which is a joint venture with dimap, a research organization in Germany. Nik also leads the team behind the Nanos Bloomberg Canadian Confidence Index[16] which monitors consumer confidence in the Canadian economy and whose data is streamed to Bloomberg News terminals every week.
His analysis and insight has appeared in the Economist Magazine,[17][18] the Wall Street Journal,[19][20] Bloomberg,[21][22] Reuters,[23][24] The Guardian,[25][26] the BBC[27][28] and all of Canada’s major media outlets. He is the pollster of record for The Globe and Mail,[29] Canada’s National Newspaper and CTV News,[30] Canada’s largest private broadcaster. He is a contributor to the Globe and Mail and has a weekly segment on CTV News Channel – Nanos on the Numbers[31] which profiles the latest political social and business trends.
Nik founded Nanos while an undergraduate student at Queen’s University. Since that time he has built a reputation for polling reliability and insight.[32] He conducted all the research[33] for Staples Business Depot in Canada as it expanded from 19 to 225 stores. He is a regular expert for BellMedia on telecommunications regulatory issues[34] before the Canada Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and has conducted numerous due diligence research projects for KPMG’s Mergers and Acquisition practice. Nik has also been an expert for reputation and trademark litigations for clients such as Staples, Adidas, PepsiCo, Heineken, Bodum and IMAX.
Nik Nanos has been named one of the Top 100 most influential people[35] in government and politics in Canada in 2017 by The Hill Times and is a regular public speaker[36] at conferences.
His research focuses on the application of supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms and the integration of large scale behavioral and sentiment datasets.
He is the author of The Age of Voter Rage, published by Eyewear Publishing Limited in the United Kingdom. The book explores populist politics and how small swings in voter sentiment and computational propaganda influence democratic outcomes in the United States, Canada, the UK and France. Nanos was also a contributing writer[37] for the book, Tactical Reading: A Snappy Guide to the Snap Election 2017 which explores the landscape in the 2017 UK General Election.
Service and Philanthropy
Nanos was the 2006-2007 National President[38] of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA), which governs and accredits over 260 research organizations and over 1,700 research professionals.
During his tenure as National President, he presided[39] over the launch of the Charter of Respondent Rights, the renewal of the marketing research industry’s professional designation and a review of the standards regulating market and public opinion research in Canada.
He currently serves as the Chair[40] of the Board of Governors of Carleton University which has 26,000 students and a budget of over $450M CDN.
Nanos also serves as one of 18 Honorary Captains[41] in the Royal Canadian Navy. HCaptain (Navy) Nanos serves with other distinguished Canadians such as Jim Balsillie, the co-founder of Blackberry and the Honorable Noel Kinsella, former Speaker of the Senate of Canada. The Honorary Captains act as ambassadors for the Royal Canadian Navy to the Canadian people as a whole.[42]
With an interest advancing and supporting journalism, Nanos led the creation and championed the G. Stuart Adam Award in Journalism,[43] which gives outstanding Master of Journalism students at Carleton the means to go out into the field, across Canada or abroad, to produce their capstone Master’s Research Project. He is a regular supporter through research[44][45] of the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, which works to defend and protect the right to free expression in Canada and around the world. Nik is a past Chair of the Government of Ontario’s Constable Joe Macdonald Public Safety Officers Survivors’ Scholarship Fund, which assists the families of police and public safety officers killed in the line of duty with the costs of post-secondary education.
Nik has served as the 69th President[46] of the Rideau Club of Canada. The founding President of the Club was Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. Other presidents of the Club have included Prime Ministers Robert Borden and Lester B. Pearson.
References
- "Nanos by the Numbers | Smith Magazine". smith.queensu.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Nik Nanos profile: Sober thoughts on turning 50 | Forever Young". Forever Young. 2014-01-16. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "The man who's never wrong". www.queensu.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Pre-2013 Results | CUSID". www.cusid.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "World Debating Championships 1987" (PDF).
- "Methods and Data Institute".
- http://canadianstudies.buffalo.edu/faculty/
- "Nik Nanos". Wilson Center. 2013-01-07. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Team | Positive Energy | University of Ottawa". www.uottawa.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Current Fellows - Marketing Research and Intelligence Association". mria-arim.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- http://www.cmc-canada.ca/membersonly/communities/community-home?CommunityKey=312b2f34-778e-480a-b56f-10e3e4dd8c24. Missing or empty
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(help) - "Nanos by the Numbers | Smith Magazine". smith.queensu.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "The man who's never wrong". www.queensu.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Nanos by the Numbers | Smith Magazine". smith.queensu.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Bob Pickard, Janice Mandel launch Signal Leadership Communication". Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Consumer Sentiment Soars as Canadians Shrug Off Rate Increases". Bloomberg.com. 2017-08-08. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "The case for building a wall to keep Canadians out".
- "The cheery new leader of Canada's Conservatives".
- "Canada Forecasts Bottom-Line Boost on Growth Surge".
- "Delayed Nafta Talks to Seep Into Political Races Next Year in U.S., Mexico".
- "Canada Consumer Confidence Edges Higher as Poloz Eyes Hike". Bloomberg.com. 2017-07-04. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Consumer Sentiment Soars as Canadians Shrug Off Rate Increases". Bloomberg.com. 2017-08-08. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- Ljunggren, David. "A conservative 'common man' set to challenge Canada's Trudeau". CA. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- Editorial, Reuters. "Under pressure over tax reform, Canada cuts small business tax". CA. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- Kassam, Ashifa (2016-11-04). "Tru love: Canada's year of Justin Trudeau has been a honeymoon, but will it last?". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- Murphy, Jessica (2015-07-01). "Canadian elections hinge on women – at the polls and behind the scenes". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "How is Canada's new leader doing?". BBC News. 2016. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- Murphy, Jessica (2017-02-17). "Canadians feeling cross-border anxiety". BBC News. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Trump presents a political opportunity for the NDP". The Globe and Mail. 2017-06-06. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Nanos on the Numbers". www.ctvnews.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Nanos on the Numbers". www.ctvnews.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Nik Nanos calls elections with finesse". www.queensu.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Nanos by the Numbers | Smith Magazine". smith.queensu.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Nanos: Only 20% of Canadians Say Ability to Watch Super Bowl Ads More Important Than Supporting Canadian Broadcasters – Bell Media". www.bellmedia.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "The Top 100: The unusual suspects - The Hill Times". The Hill Times. 2017-02-08. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Nik Nanos". Bespoken Bureau. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "TACTICAL READING: A SNAPPY GUIDE TO THE SNAP ELECTION 2017". Glopal CA. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "Past Presidents - Marketing Research and Intelligence Association". mria-arim.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "World's First Charter of Respondent Rights Highlights Research Industry's Commitment to the Canadian Public" (PDF).
- "Nik Nanos - Board of Governors". carleton.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- Navy, Government of Canada, National Defence, Royal Canadian. "Royal Canadian Navy - Honorary Navy Captains". www.navy-marine.forces.gc.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- Navy, Government of Canada, National Defence, Royal Canadian. "Royal Canadian Navy - Honorary Navy Captains". www.navy-marine.forces.gc.ca. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "G. Stuart Adam Graduate Award in Journalism - Carleton FutureFunder". Carleton FutureFunder. Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "CJFE to Release Annual Review of Free Expression in Canada". Retrieved 2017-10-31.
- "DO CANADIANS CARE ABOUT FREE EXPRESSION?" (PDF).
- "Rideau Club" (PDF).