TV Was Never Built to Behave Like Meta
- May 17
- 5 min read
Updated: May 19
Article by David Nyurenberg.
If you sat through this year’s upfront presentations, one theme was impossible to miss: outcomes.
Every major media company talked about performance, attribution, optimization, and measurable business impact. The language of direct response marketing dominated the week.
That is not surprising. Television companies are fighting for budgets increasingly flowing toward Google and Meta. What is surprising is how completely the industry has started collapsing fundamentally different advertising mediums into the same conversation.
Television’s Core Value Proposition Never Changed
Streaming changed distribution. It did not fundamentally change human psychology. For decades, marketers understood something simple about television advertising: TV worked through a powerful combination of familiarity, emotional connection, memory, and cultural presence over time. It reached people at scale, creating awareness long before a consumer actively entered the market for a product.
This fundamental truth has not changed. Ever since modern advertising emerged around the 1880s and 1890s, its value comes from building mental availability so that when consumers eventually make a purchasing decision, the brand is already familiar and top of mind.
The internet did not replace that dynamic. It created something new alongside it—an entirely new category of advertising built around capturing demand in the moment. Within this new channel, tactics like Search and Social became extraordinarily effective at capturing intent in the moment. But it's important to note that was an addition of a new channel to the marketing ecosystem, not a rewriting of the existing fundamentals of advertising or human behavior.
CTV Is Still Television
Television has long remained uniquely effective at those fundamentals because of its scale, immersion, storytelling capability, and ability to command attention.The digitization of television and it's transition to CTV does not change this fact simply because the ads are now delivered through apps instead of radiowaves of cable set-top boxes. Part of what makes television uniquely valuable is its ability to attach brands to emotion, culture, and shared moments in time. Great television advertising creates emotional memory.
That is why brands still spend enormous amounts of money around live sports, major cultural events, and premium television environments despite those impressions often being more expensive and less immediately attributable than lower-funnel digital media. Great television advertising creates emotional memory. It builds familiarity before a consumer enters the market, and makes brands feel culturally relevant rather than simply present inside an auction. This has always been television’s superpower.
Yet somewhere along the way, the industry started speaking about CTV as though QR codes, attribution dashboards, and software layers somehow transformed television into a direct response medium operating similarly to search and social. This framing is becoming increasingly disconnected from reality. Think about it. Google captures intent. Meta monetizes active engagement and rapid behavioral feedback loops.
Television, by contrast, does something entirely different: it shapes future purchasing decisions rather than harvesting existing intent in the moment. This does not mean CTV is ineffective. It simply means television was never architected to behave like direct response search and social platforms.
Different Consumer States, Different Outcomes
This distinction matters enormously. Someone searching for “best accountant near me” on Google is in an active decision-making state. Sorry to break it to you, but someone watching Netflix on their couch is not. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to deduce these are fundamentally different consumer experiences, different psychological states, and different advertising environments. Yet the industry persists in speaking about them as though they should produce similar performance behavior and similar advertiser expectations.
I’m already seeing the repercussions firsthand. At issue is many DTC and SMB advertisers now entering CTV grew their brands entirely using Meta, Google, TikTok, and Shopify. They’ve been conditioned to expect immediate attribution, immediate optimization, and immediate proof that every dollar worked. So it's not entirely surprising they bring these same expectations to television. Campaigns launch, and brands expect paid social-style immediacy, with observable ROAS within days. They expect television to function like a highly responsive feedback loop. When this doesn't happen instantly, many conclude the channel itself is underperforming, or worse doesn't work in the first place.
Television has never functioned this way. TV has always been a medium where repetition, familiarity, emotional resonance, and sustained exposure matter. Its power compounds over time.
As more brands shift ad spend to CTV—a channel that's expected to grow between 13.8 and 17 percent this year—we’re teaching an entire generation of marketers to judge television using the behavioral expectations of paid search.
This is dangerous for the long-term health of the channel. Part of the problem is the infrastructure realities of CTV are fundamentally different from the environments marketers are comparing it against. Because they are Walled Gardens, Google and Meta largely operate inside deterministic, closed-loop ecosystems. Impression, click, identity signal, and conversion frequently happen within the same environment, and often on the same device.
CTV Was Never Built as a Closed-Loop System
CTV works differently by nature. The ad impression itself happens on a television screen, while the conversion usually happens later on a mobile phone or desktop computer. Connecting those events relies heavily on probabilistic identity systems and device graphs attempting to infer relationships between devices inside a household. This does not make CTV ineffective. It simply means television was never architected to behave like direct response search and social platforms. And it shouldn’t need to, I would argue.
Interestingly, many marketers are now starting to "discover" concepts like attention, storytelling, premium environments, emotional resonance, and brand recall because performance media across the open web has become increasingly noisy, saturated, and commoditized. Ironically, many marketers are now rediscovering concepts like attention, storytelling, premium environments, emotional resonance, and brand recall because performance media across the open web has become increasingly noisy, saturated, and commoditized.
If you ask me, short-termism is a real risk here. You cannot build enduring brands by evaluating every media channel exclusively through immediate response behavior. Yet much of the discourse around CTV increasingly frames television through the lens of biddable infrastructure, optimization mechanics, and attribution tooling rather than the underlying consumer experience itself.
Central to this narrative is the "technology layer," which has become the loudest voice defining what television is supposed to be. And in many ways, this tech-first conversation has pulled the industry further away from understanding what made television effective in the first place.
The Industry Is Rediscovering TV's Original Strengths
Sure, CTV absolutely can drive measurable business outcomes. In many cases, it performs exceptionally well. But the industry needs to stop forcing television into frameworks built around channels designed primarily for intent capture and immediate response.
Television is different. It always has been. Its value comes from attention, emotion, memory, storytelling, and cultural relevance. The digitization of the medium did not erase those fundamentals.
But in the race to make CTV fit neatly into modern performance marketing narratives, the industry accidentally started devaluing the very characteristics that made television powerful in the first place.
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David Nyurenberg is a veteran media and advertising executive with deep expertise in television, streaming, and performance marketing. As a member of Signal & Noise’s Executive Voices contributor network, he writes about the evolving intersection of media, technology, and consumer behavior, with a particular focus on how Connected TV is reshaping modern advertising.
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