For two decades, digital advertising revolved around two pillars: Google and Meta. Together, they built an empire on performance. Their measurable, accountable, ROI-driven marketing transformed how brands spend.
But the next performance revolution is happening on TV.
Each year, tvScientific surveys more than 600 marketers across brands and agencies to understand the shifts reshaping advertising. While the full report drops in January, early data already points to a massive industry transformation driven by a crisis of attention and the growing value of engaged viewership.
Here are four reasons why CTV is on track to become the performance channel that rivals, and eventually surpasses, Google and Meta.
Let’s be honest: legacy programmatic formats are bad.
Display and OLV ads were built for a different internet. They’re marked by cluttered feeds, small screens, and fleeting attention. Viewability standards that count “50% of pixels in view for one second” as an impression are absurd. For decades, that threshold was one pixel for one second, which is orders of magnitude worse than absurd.
CTV is the opposite. It delivers 99% viewability, 95%+ completion rates, and 100% share of screen, all on the biggest screen in the room, with sound on and the audience in a lean-back mindset. And TVs are ubiquitous – the average US HH has 2.3 TVs in it, with an average of 5+ hours a day viewing time.
No wonder half of marketers say access to attentive, engaged viewers is the #1 reason CTV is so effective, according to early findings from tvScientific’s upcoming 2026 State of Performance TV Report.
The superior ad experience drives superior engagement. And now we can prove that engagement translates into business outcomes.
In 2025, 67% of marketers said CTV helped them achieve revenue and growth goals, and a striking 90% expect it to do the same in 2026.
Even more telling, 64% of marketers report their company’s sales increased after adding CTV to their marketing mix.
CTV is becoming a true growth channel.
TV attribution used to be a guessing game. It was measured in reach and frequency, and most marketers treated it like an awareness play.
Now, on modern platforms, TV measurement and analytics have leapfrogged legacy walled gardens like Google and Meta. It has become far more transparent, verifiable, and controllable than ever before, and is starting to surpass the walled gardens in these metrics as well.
Marketers can now connect ad exposure to outcomes (sales, installs, signups) on a deterministic basis and calculate incremental ROAS at the granular level. That level of transparency is getting harder to find inside Google Display or Meta Ads.
Nearly half of marketers say connecting TV spend to measurable outcomes is what they value most about CTV, while 48% plan to run incrementality tests next year. That’s triple the number from 2025, making transparency the new performance advantage.
Another myth that needs retiring is that TV is hard to buy.
Self-serve CTV platforms make it easier to launch, measure, and optimize campaigns than search or social, with full transparency into placements and performance.
That accessibility is fueling a major reallocation of spend. CTV has now tied with social as the most effective marketing channel, each earning 25% of marketers’ confidence. Search trails far behind at 11%.
And budgets are moving fast: 58% of marketers are pulling dollars from YouTube, 56% from Meta, and 52% from TikTok to fund their CTV campaigns.
Given the format advantages, measurable ROI, and transparent tech now available, Performance TV is poised to overtake search as the dominant performance channel within the next 5-7 years.
CTV is becoming what digital advertising always promised to be: a transparent, accountable, high-performing ecosystem that rewards creativity and data in equal measure.
And this time, it’s happening on the biggest screen in the house.
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.