• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, March 21, 2016

Marketers have long known strongly emotional shows mean good response and recall for their TV ads. Twitter says syncing a Twitter ad with a traditional TV commercial adds another 9% lift to ad recall.

Sounds great -- but it’s hardly ground-breaking news. According to a recent Twitter study, emotionally strong TV shows push TV viewers to talk about a show’s content, using the biggest of emotional words -- “love,” “excited,” or perhaps “hate.”

Maybe these viewers stay focused on the screen, forgetting to grab the remote. Perhaps they’re so overcome with emotion, they blank on fast-forwarding through commercials and instead mull the idea of some GEICO car insurance or make a mental note of needing household supplies from nearest Walmart.

But what about those non-emotional TV shows? In other words, where is Twitter when you need it? TV networks may ask that question. We can imagine those TV shows don’t do that well, yielding poor viewing and thus not much interest from TV advertisers or long-term engagement from viewers either in future traditional TV viewing or social media.

So try and answer this question: Is Twitter a significant marketing helper for TV -- or just a decent measuring tool of how well TV advertising performs?

Much first-party data from TV marketers is obviously the next step in getting a clearer picture. After all, consumers using emotional words in a tweet is one thing, but actual purchasing decisions are another.

If you “love” a TV show or product, you know that takes commitment.