We all know by now that the “Tracy Morgan passed out…” stunt at last Sunday’s Emmy Awards drove the highest spike in public social media mentions during the show and spawned a worldwide trending topic on Twitter.

While the consumer side of me personally despised the greasy “bait & switch” of the whole thing, the researcher in me immediately wanted to know: Will this actually drive tune-in?Especially since this is a heavily debated topic which has been recently been resurrected.

Using Bluefin Labs own “social mentions” chart as a base, Hill Holliday’s Network Buying team (thanks to Erica Sperry) overlaid Nielsen minute-by-minute ratings (above in RED) to see if there’s any apparent correlation to when social activity spiked versus actual Emmys tune-in on ABC.

While there is a ratings peak at the time of the stunt, it’s very similar to the other peaks throughout the Emmys airing.  So then we looked at the ratings within various demographic slices and the only demo that showed a notable spike in ratings around the time of the Tracy Morgan stunt were men 12-24 years old (chart below).

So in the end, can we say there was a direct and evident correlation between the Twitter stunt to get people to tune in to the Emmys on ABC? Not really. Could it have accounted for some lift in viewership as it trended on Twitter? Possibly.

Let the ratings debate continue…