For years, performance advertising followed a strict model: search captured intent, and social scaled engagement. TV sat adjacent. It was powerful, but largely treated as a brand channel rather than a performance engine.
As of 2026, data indicates that model has broken.
Performance TV has emerged as the single largest destination for performance advertising spend. More than 600 marketers report plans to reduce social spending in favor of TV, according to the 2026 State of Performance TV report, which launches today.
Responses from performance marketers across brands and agencies point to a structural shift: TV is no longer siloed from the rest of the performance mix and is being held accountable just like search and social as true performance engines.
Why this shift is happening now
The rise of performance TV is the result of several forces converging at once.
First, the performance bar has been raised. Marketers are under increasing pressure to prove outcomes instead of proxies. Reach, impressions, and frequency still matter, but they are no longer sufficient. Every channel is being evaluated through the same lens: can it drive measurable business impact?
Second, TV has changed. Connected TV and streaming environments have transformed how television is bought, measured, and optimized. What was once a slow, opaque medium is now programmable, testable, and increasingly accountable. TV can finally participate in the same feedback loops that made search and social dominant performance channels in the first place.
Third, attention has become scarce. Consumers are fragmented across platforms and devices, but TV remains one of the few environments that still delivers sustained, high-attention moments at scale. In a crowded performance landscape, that attention matters.
Together, these dynamics are forcing a reallocation of attention and budget away from increasingly saturated social environments like YouTube and TikTok and toward channels that can still deliver scale, attention, and measurable impact.
TV complements other performance channels
Performance TV and other performance channels, like social, play different roles in the same system. TV excels at demand creation, introducing ideas, shaping perception, and driving interest at scale. Social excels at engagement, reinforcement, and interaction. When TV works, it feeds social performance.
This isn’t “TV vs social.” They work together.
Exposure on TV can influence downstream behavior across devices and platforms: searches, site visits, app installs, and social engagement. Social, in turn, captures and compounds that demand. The result is a flywheel in which TV and social complement and reinforce each other.
With this in mind, the rise of performance TV should be understood as an ecosystem upgrade. As TV becomes more measurable and outcome-driven, it strengthens the entire performance stack.
Advertising history repeats itself
There’s a historical parallel worth noting.
In the mid-2000s, search crossed a major threshold. It moved from being an experimental line item to the foundation of performance marketing. Once marketers trusted it to drive outcomes reliably, spend followed.
TV appears to be at a similar inflection point now.
Like search then, performance TV today combines three critical ingredients: scale, accountability, and compounding returns. As marketers gain confidence in its ability to drive outcomes, TV will become table stakes for performance marketers, just as search did 20 years ago.
Once social entered the scene in the 2010s, advertisers grew to adopt a performance marketing mindset that leveraged both search and social in complementary ways. If history is any indication of the future, we can anticipate that TV will become the third channel to round out the performance marketing mix.
What this means for marketers
Performance planning can no longer treat TV as a separate discipline with separate goals. It belongs in the same conversations as search and social, evaluated by the same standards and optimized together.
For marketers, the key to winning in this next iteration of performance advertising will be to design performance systems that recognize how channels reinforce one another.
TV becoming the top performance spend channel doesn’t signal the decline of other channels, but the maturation of performance marketing itself.
2026 may be remembered as the year TV finally became what search once was: not just powerful, but indispensable.
Download the full report to see how marketers are reallocating budget and rethinking performance in the year ahead.
Inside Performance Advertising with Jason Fairchild delivers unfiltered insights, strategic perspective, and hard truths from inside the evolving world of adtech—cutting through the noise to focus on what really drives outcomes. Subscribe here.
