An AI Made The Case For TV. We Didn't Write A Word Of It.
We asked Google's Gemini a simple question: how do television ads shape the way people search, shop and think? What came back reads less like a chatbot answer and more like a defense brief for connected TV.
Search captures demand. According to Gemini, TV and CTV are what create it in the first place. Every commercial break is a prompt: a search, a question to an AI, a product lookup. That's the theory. So we pushed further and asked Gemini a harder question directly: have brands pulled too much money out of TV?
It didn't hedge. Most analysts and media planners believe the pendulum has swung too far, and for the first time, global spend on commerce and retail media is on pace to pass total television ad spend. Gemini had a name for how that happened, and a clear view of what it costs once the budget is gone.
The halo effect, in reverse
Pull too much budget out of TV and the halo effect that search and social have quietly relied on for years starts running backward. Search volume and digital conversion rates begin to slip even if digital spend holds steady, because the person who would have searched your brand three days after seeing a TV spot never saw the spot at all.
That's the trap with last-click attribution. It's very good at telling you which channel closed the sale. It has nothing to say about which channel opened the door.
Where the $4 billion goes
Gemini put a number on one piece of this: an estimated $4 billion in streaming ad spend is misplaced every year, landing outside a brand's intended premium inventory because of blind spots in programmatic CTV buying. Budgets haven't just left the television screen, they've fragmented across it.
Layer on frequency exhaustion, the reality of managing reach across a dozen disjointed streaming platforms with no centralized control, and campaigns end up serving the same ad to the same household on repeat. That burns budget and tests the viewer's patience at the same time.
Right-sizing the mix, not abandoning it
None of this is an argument for pulling back from search, social or retail media. Linear TV viewership is aging as younger audiences favor short-form video, and commerce media earns its growing share of the budget honestly. The most effective media plans aren't choosing one over the other.
They're right-sizing the mix: linear for broad reach, CTV for targeted household penetration, and digital to capture the demand that TV creates in the first place. And they're measuring that whole system with tools like Media Mix Modeling instead of judging every channel by the last click alone.
The bottom line
Gemini's own conclusion lines up with why we built Engage 4U. Connected TV sits right at the intersection it's describing: the reach of television, on the same screens people use to search, shop and scroll.
If your search and social numbers have plateaued, the gap is probably further up the funnel than your reporting can see. Engage 4U plans and activates CTV alongside search and social so the channels build on each other instead of fighting over credit.
Sources: "Asking An Answer Engine About TV Ads' Impact On Answer Engines," MediaPost Media Insider, August 6, 2026. Google Gemini, responses to direct queries, August 2026. Effectv, "Digital Loves TV" research report.
Ready to right-size your mix?
Let's talk about what a media plan built on TV's full funnel, not just its last click, could look like for you.
Talk to CTV MediaCurious about the measurement gap behind these numbers? Read The KPI Blind Spot.