A CMO at a mid-sized B2B software company recently shared a familiar story: €350,000 spent on a regional TV campaign, zero attributable demo requests three months later. When I asked about their conversion tracking setup, the silence was telling. This isn’t an outlier – it’s become the default experience for brands still treating television as a primary acquisition channel.
Marketing analytics firm Big Chalk’s 2024 cross-channel analysis found that linear TV delivered just 62 cents for every dollar invested – the lowest return among 11 measured media channels, where the weighted average stood at $2.07. That’s not ROI. That’s a 38% loss wearing the costume of brand awareness. The question isn’t whether TV advertising has value – it’s whether that value justifies its cost when measured against alternatives.
TV Advertising Budget Crisis – The Audience Migration Is Complete
Nielsen’s May 2025 Gauge report documented a watershed moment: streaming captured 44.8% of total TV usage, surpassing the combined share of broadcast (20.1%) and cable (24.1%) for the first time in measurement history. This isn’t a trend – it’s a conclusion. Since 2021, streaming usage has increased 71%, while broadcast declined 21% and cable dropped 39%.
S&P Global projects the US broadcast TV and radio station industry will decline 9.3% to $32.83 billion in total advertising revenue in 2025 – a drop driven primarily by the post-election, non-Olympic advertising calendar, but accelerated by structural audience erosion that won’t reverse.
The demographic breakdown reveals the deeper problem. Gen Z CTV users have grown from 46.9 million in 2021 to over 56 million in 2025, while their traditional TV consumption has become statistically negligible. A B2C athletic apparel brand discovered their prime-time TV spots reached an average viewer age of 58 – while their target customer base (25-40) was watching YouTube and Instagram Reels. You’re not buying reach anymore; you’re buying the memory of reach.
Precision Gap Cannot Be Closed
TV advertising operates on demographic assumptions that seemed reasonable in 2005. You purchase “adults 25-54” and hope your ideal customer happens to be watching. A B2B cybersecurity firm spent €180,000 targeting IT decision-makers during business news programming. Their post-campaign survey revealed that 73% of their target audience consumed security content through podcasts during their commute – not morning television.
Digital advertising allows targeting by job title, company size, purchase intent signals, browsing behaviour, and geographic precision down to postal code. You can reach the CFO of a manufacturing company who researched your competitors last week and downloaded a whitepaper on your exact solution category. TV allows you to reach “people who might be watching at 8 PM on Tuesday.” The precision gap isn’t closing – it’s widening with every advancement in programmatic targeting.
Attribution Remains Structurally Impossible
When your CEO asks which channels drove Q3 revenue, your digital team produces conversion data segmented by creative, audience, and touchpoint. Your TV investment generates “estimated brand lift” from a third-party model designed to justify the spend rather than measure it.
A consumer electronics company ran parallel campaigns: €280,000 on TV and €90,000 on YouTube pre-roll targeting identical audience demographics. YouTube generated 847 trackable purchases with full attribution. TV generated attribution models that assumed 40% of their sales lift came from the spots – assumptions they couldn’t validate but needed to justify the budget allocation. This isn’t about digital being marginally better at measurement. It’s about TV offering no reliable attribution while consuming budgets that could fund entire annual digital strategies with complete visibility.
Cost Structure Eliminates Experimentation
A 30-second prime-time network spot costs between $115,000 and $425,000, with production adding another $50,000-$500,000 before your ad airs once. For a mid-sized B2B company, that’s not a marketing expense – it’s a quarter-defining bet.
Meanwhile, a B2C meal kit service tested 40 different Instagram ad variations with a €22,000 budget, identified their three best performers within 11 days, and scaled those. A TV campaign takes weeks to produce and launch. If it underperforms, you’ve spent money you cannot recover on learning you could have acquired for 5% of the cost through digital experimentation.
The cost structure of television doesn’t just limit testing – it eliminates it. And marketing without experimentation is expensive guessing.
Friction Gap Is Structural
Your TV ad ends with “visit our website” or displays a URL. The viewer must remember that information, locate their phone, and manually search for you – assuming they’re motivated enough to interrupt whatever they’re watching. Every step is a conversion killer.
A B2C furniture retailer discovered that only 8% of viewers who reported seeing their TV ads visited their website within 72 hours. Their Instagram Shopping posts converted at 23% click-to-site rates because the purchase path was immediate: see product, tap, buy. Even QR codes in TV spots – which require viewers to photograph their television screens – add unnecessary steps to a journey that digital makes seamless.
Real-Time Response Is Impossible
A global SaaS company’s major product feature broke at 9 AM on Tuesday. By noon, they’d paused all digital ads promoting that feature and shifted budget to alternative product lines. Their TV campaign promoting the broken feature ran for another eight days because stopping it meant eating the entire media buy.
Television advertising operates on the timeline of 2010 marketing, where campaigns were planned quarterly and executed monthly. Modern business requires daily optimisation. When your competitor launches a better offer, when market conditions shift, when your product changes – you need to respond immediately, not in the next TV flight.
Attention Economics Have Inverted
Research on viewing patterns shows that 67% of viewers with DVR capabilities fast-forward through commercials, while another 18% use commercial breaks for other activities. The counterargument is that digital ads get skipped too – but the critical difference is targeting context. A well-executed YouTube pre-roll reaches viewers actively searching for related content. A TV commercial interrupts whatever they were watching with something statistically unlikely to be relevant.
When attention is marketing’s scarcest resource, TV advertising wastes it at industrial scale while charging premium prices for the privilege.
What TV Money Could Buy Instead
This isn’t an argument that television has zero value – it remains useful for mass awareness campaigns, live sports adjacency, and certain demographic reaches. But the financial case for TV as a primary acquisition channel has collapsed under the weight of measurable alternatives.
The €350,000 that CMO spent on regional TV could have funded: a full year of programmatic display with attribution, comprehensive LinkedIn and YouTube campaigns targeting exact buyer personas, creative testing across 50+ variations, retargeting infrastructure, and still left budget for experimentation. Instead, they received impressions they couldn’t verify reached anyone who mattered.
The question isn’t whether your brand should ever use television. It’s whether you’ve honestly evaluated what that budget could accomplish elsewhere – and whether institutional inertia is determining your media mix instead of evidence.
If your current marketing strategy includes significant TV budget allocation, the conversation worth having isn’t about incremental optimisation – it’s about fundamental reallocation. A comprehensive Marketing Strategy consultation can map where that spend should actually go – and what measurable ROI you should expect. We’ve helped companies reallocate substantial TV budgets into Digital Advertising that produces attributable results rather than attribution models.
Book a consultation to discuss whether your media mix reflects current market realities – or the market that existed when your strategy was last genuinely questioned.
