Performance TV has officially become the number one channel for advertising investment, according to a new report from ad-tech firm tvScientific. The findings show marketers are reallocating budgets away from social media giants, rewiring the digital ad world as pressure for measurable results intensifies.
The great reallocation: For years, TV ads were walled off from the rest of the performance marketing world, running on brand-building metrics alone. That wall has crumbled. A survey of over 600 marketers reveals a clear shift in spending away from platforms like Meta and YouTube, driven by the rise of connected TV and streaming, which have turned the once-opaque medium into a transparent, data-rich environment.
Better together: The report frames this not as a battle between TV and social, but as an evolution of the entire marketing playbook. In this new model, TV serves as the top of the funnel, creating broad demand and shaping perception. Social media then captures that interest, fostering engagement and creating a self-reinforcing loop.
We've seen this movie before: The playbook here is reminiscent of search marketing's journey in the mid-2000s, when it evolved from an experimental side-bet into an essential pillar of performance advertising. tvScientific posits that TV is now making that same leap, combining scale, accountability, and compounding returns to become a foundational part of modern marketing.
Once treated as a separate discipline with separate goals, television has now earned a permanent seat at the performance marketing table, forcing brands to evaluate it by the same exacting standards as search and social. The complete State of Performance TV report is available for download with all the underlying data.
