The Impact of Emotion Alignment on Ad Attention in Streaming TV

Executive summary

In this study, we compared how much attention people paid to ads when the emotions they evoked matched the content, vs. when they were not aligned with the emotional tone of the content. Looking across more than 50 campaigns spanning every major vertical — retail, QSR, CPG, finance, auto, entertainment and more — we found:

• Viewers in this study paid more attention to ads that matched the content’s emotion, with attention for 30-second ads jumping from 27% to 66% of the ad, a 2.4x boost.
• Whether 15 or 30 seconds long, emotionally aligned ads got similar attention levels — showing that emotion keeps viewers engaged no matter the length.

This helps explain why emotionally resonant campaigns continue to outperform across all metrics from brand awareness to lower-funnel performance KPIs: People are more likely to watch — and stay watching — when the ad feels emotionally in tune with what they were just viewing. Emotions can help bridge the gap between content and ad attention — putting ad attention on par with content attention in TV.

What we measured (and how)

To quantify emotional alignment, we paired:

• TVision’s second-by-second attention data, measured across hundreds of apps, thousands of programs and billions of seconds of TV viewing.
• Wurl’s BrandDiscovery platform, which analyzes the dialogue, sound, and imagery of content and ad creatives in real time, scoring eight core emotions for intensity on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high). Advertisers can use these scores to target the emotions present in programming just before ad breaks, enabling precise contextual campaigns across Wurl’s 95B+ monthly available impressions.