Marketers have spent a decade shifting budget toward social and digital video on the assumption that’s where awareness gets built now. TVB’s 2026 Purchase Funnel Study, conducted with GfK/NIQ, says the assumption doesn’t hold up.

Forty-two percent of consumers pointed to linear TV as the single biggest factor shaping their awareness of a product or service. Social media trailed at 9%. YouTube-style streaming video came in even lower, at 6%. TV isn’t slightly ahead here. It’s more than four times ahead of social and seven times ahead of non-TV streaming video.

Why TV wins awareness, mechanically

The gap isn’t a mystery once you look at how each format is actually consumed. Nielsen research shows TV generates a 23% brand awareness lift compared to 9% for digital advertising, and CTV specifically delivers a 20% lift in purchase intent and a 25% improvement in ad recall. Attention data explains why: CTV attention scores run between 58.9 and 69.5, versus 38.4 for standard online video and just 23.2 for display advertising. Completion rates on connected TV run above 95%, not because viewers can’t skip, but because a full-screen ad inside premium content simply holds attention that a scrollable feed doesn’t.

Picture the two viewing moments side by side. A viewer settling into a primetime drama or a live game has already committed to the screen; the ad runs full-screen, full-volume, with no skip button in reach. A viewer scrolling a social feed is doing the opposite: thumb already hovering over the next post, sound off by default. One environment is built for a message to land. The other is built for a message to be scrolled past before it registers.

That difference shows up in how people actually describe discovering a brand. Someone who saw a new SUV during a football broadcast will usually say, “I saw it on TV.” Someone who scrolled past the same ad in a feed often can’t recall seeing it at all, let alone name the brand behind it. TV’s advantage isn’t that people prefer television; it’s that television doesn’t give them the option to look away.

The purchase intent lift plays out the same way. A viewer who sees a CTV ad during a show they chose to watch is more likely to pick up their phone during the next commercial break and search the brand, not because the ad was clever, but because the moment of exposure wasn’t competing with anything else for their attention.

Awareness is still won at scale

This finding sits at the top of the funnel, and that’s precisely where it matters most. Awareness is a scale problem before it’s a targeting problem: a brand can’t be considered if it was never seen, and it can’t be recalled if the impression never held attention long enough to register. Social and digital video are effective at narrower jobs and community-building, but the study makes clear they aren’t replacing what mass-reach TV does at the awareness stage.

Building the 2026 plan around the real driver

At Media Manager, we push clients to look past the metrics that are easiest to report, clicks, views, shares, and toward the ones that actually explain why a brand gets chosen. We size the channel mix around evidence like this instead of habit: TV for the awareness it’s proven to build, digital and social for the narrower jobs they’re proven to do well.