TVB’s 2026 Purchase Funnel Study found that 89% of respondents said ads they see on linear TV influence the online searches they perform afterward. It’s easy to file that number under branding and move on. However, it belongs under attribution: a measurable link between a TV spot and a digital action most teams are already tracking.

The measurement gap was never a data gap

Marketers have spent years arguing TV’s impact is hard to prove because it doesn’t produce a click. But nine in ten people telling researchers that linear TV ads influence what they search for next is a signal sitting inside data most teams already collect: branded search volume, search lift around flight dates, paid search cost movement after a
TV campaign launches.

The problem was never that TV fails to create a trackable action. It’s that the trackable action lives in a different report than the one showing the TV spend.

Picture a back-to-school campaign. A retailer’s TV flight breaks the last week of July, right as families start planning for the school year. Within days, branded search volume for the retailer spikes, paid search on backpack and laptop-related terms can get more efficient as more of that traffic arrives already primed to convert, and site traffic climbs before a single back-to-school email has gone out. None of that gets logged as a TV result on the media plan. It shows up in the search and analytics dashboard, credited to whichever channel happens to sit next to the click, usually paid search, since that’s the one with a report that says so.

At Media Manager, we build measurement plans that tie TV flight dates directly to branded search and site traffic, so a client isn’t left arguing that TV “probably” drove a result. The research explains why the connection exists. The flight-date data shows it in the client’s own numbers.

Why this matters for 2026 budgets

Budget conversations get easier when a channel’s contribution to a metric the CFO already watches is demonstrable. Search lift tied to TV flights is exactly that kind of proof. A back-to-school flight that visibly moves branded search and improves paid search efficiency during its window is a harder budget to cut than one that only shows up as an assumed number in the plan.

TV was never just a branding play. The evidence was there the whole time. It just needed to sit next to the right report.