January 25, 2023
Social Engagement On Twitter Could Drive TV Ad Memorability
- by Wayne Friedman , March 9, 2015
Changes in Twitter TV activity correlate much of the time with brain activity -- specifically emotion, memory, and attention, according to Nielsen. Nielsen’s Neuro division, which studies engagement in advertising, says this is the case 79.5% of the time.
Nielsen studied minute-by-minute at Twitter activity, tweets, around live airings of eight prime-time broadcast and cable TV shows with varied levels of Twitter activity and TV ratings. It did not disclose specifics.
What does this mean for TV programmers and advertisers? Nielsen says social media now stands as a bellwether for general audience engagement. Networks, agencies and advertisers should better understand how audiences on Twitter are interacting with TV programming by analyzing those conversations taking place.
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Specifically, for TV marketers, Nielsen says advertising in highly social programs could be an opportunity to drive both advertising memorability and sales outcomes.
Top Nielsen Twitter TV ratings for the most recent reporting week ending March 1 show NBC’s “Parks and Recreation” has the highest unique audience of 4.63 million, followed by AMC’s “The Walking Dead” at 3.62 million; NBC’s “The Voice” (Tuesday) with 3.17 million; ABC’s “The Bachelor” at 2.92 million; and NBC’s “The Voice” (Monday) with 2.78 million.
The next five are Fox’s “Empire” at 2.77 million; ABC’s “How to Get Away With Murder” with 2.44 million; BET’s “BET Honors 2015” at 2.23 million; USA’s “WWE Monday Night Raw” with 1.81 million; and MTV’s “Catfish: The TV Show” at 1.80 million.
This admonition about the possible benefit of advertising in highly "social" TV shows would be a lot more convincing if Nielsen's commercial recall/impact division could supply an analysis showing that such shows invariably generate better ad recall/motivation results than other, less "social" programs, when the same ads run in both kinds of content. Obviously, you would hold the demos constant and, probably, the program genre/daypart, as well.