The $1.81 Billion Cost of Leaving Television
The Scale Only Television Delivers
Television remains a proven channel for efficient mass reach. Its scale is what builds a brand’s demand at the top of the funnel, among audiences who are not yet customers, and it is what every lower-funnel channel later depends on to convert. Over the past five years, though, many major advertisers have reduced that reach, moving budget into streaming, social, and creator media that offer more granular measurement.
We analyzed the media spend of fifty of them. Among the advertisers that cut television, $647M came out of TV budgets, and $1.81B went back into digital to rebuild the reach those cuts gave up, roughly three dollars spent for every dollar removed. The scale was far cheaper to hold than to replace.
How Last-Click Attribution Misses Television
One factor behind these cuts is how advertising is commonly measured. Last-click attribution assigns a sale to the final touch before purchase, which is often a search or a direct visit. Television, whose effect can register later and through other channels, is structurally hard for that model to credit. It is a limitation the industry has long recognized, and one reason a channel built for broad reach can look weaker in performance reporting than its contribution to demand would suggest.
What Adidas Found When It Ran the Numbers
Adidas is the clearest case in the data, because the company measured it directly. In 2017 it moved 77% of its budget into short-term digital to accelerate online revenue. The company later ran an econometric analysis of what was actually driving sales. By its own account, brand-building of the kind television delivers was generating 65% of sales across all channels, and when a paid-search outage temporarily halted those ads in one market, the company reported no measurable revenue impact. Its global media director, Simon Peel, told a 2019 industry conference that Adidas had believed digital was driving its e-commerce sales and had over-invested there. The company rebuilt a mix with more television and reported that 60% of its revenue was coming from first-time buyers.
Most advertisers making the same shift have not published a comparable analysis of their own.
When Reach Falls, Growth Tends to Follow
Lowe’s reduced its television share further than most. In 2020 it spent roughly $50 on television for every dollar on digital; by the first half of 2026, television was about 8% of its measured advertising, and its revenue fell over the same years. Ace Hardware, a smaller competitor that held more of its budget in television, grew its revenue every year over the same span. The two moved in opposite directions, in both media mix and results.
The same relationship shows up in search behavior. As Lowe's television share fell, searches for the brand by name fell with it, year after year. Google's Gemini describes the mechanism directly, calling linear and connected TV the primary engines that generate search demand while paid search mostly captures demand that already exists. Gemini estimates television drives a 20% to 60% uplift in a brand's search volume, which it attributes to the 83% of viewers who watch with a second screen in hand.
The same pattern holds across other advertisers. As JCPenney and HomeGoods each pulled back on television, searches for their brands declined alongside the cut, year after year.
It runs in the other direction too. Shopify raised television from a single-digit share of its mix to roughly half, and its brand search climbed over the same period.
The Same Pattern in Seven More Categories
Seven more advertisers, across seven categories, reduced their television share over the same window, and growth slowed for nearly all of them.
Ulta Beauty cut television from 58% of its mix to about 1%, and its same-store growth fell from 5.7% to 0.7% across four years of shrinking operating margins. Etsy cut TV spending from roughly $70M a year to $12M, and its sales fell four years running, with profit halved in 2025. Little Caesars reduced television from 96% of its mix to 53%; over the same window its brand-search index fell about 29% and its growth slowed from 3.5% to 0.4%. Target cut TV investment 42% and posted four straight quarters of falling traffic. BMW’s revenue and profit have declined every year since its 2023 cut. Dick’s raised digital spending from $56M to $156M while reducing television. Unilever moved about half its budget into social and influencers; the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has associated going dark on mass media with a 16% first-year sales decline.
Many things move a business, and no one case is decisive. But seven companies in seven categories moving the same way is a pattern worth taking seriously.
Reach Is the Advantage Worth Protecting
Streaming, social, and creator media each do something well, and none of this argues for abandoning them. What none of them delivers at the same scale is reach into a whole category, among the future customers a brand has not met yet. A mix weighted almost entirely toward narrow, trackable audiences deepens engagement with buyers who already know the brand, but it does not expand the audience beyond them.
Reach is the number of real people an ad puts a brand in front of, and it is a primary source of the demand other channels convert. The advertisers in this analysis spent close to three dollars to rebuild it for every dollar they saved by cutting it.
This is what Simulmedia is built for. We find a brand’s real audience accurately, deliver guaranteed reach against it across TV and streaming, and hold that reach to the same business outcomes as any other channel. The advertisers who protect their scale, or rebuild it first, reach the next generation of customers while their competitors keep optimizing for the customers they already have.
Sources: MediaRadar; company earnings releases and 10-K filings; Modern Retail; The Wall Street Journal; Ehrenberg-Bass Institute; MediaPost. Simulmedia analysis.