I’m not here to pick a fight with social. Or maybe I am.
Social networks pull a far bigger share of ad budgets than they do of the time people actually spend with media, according to eMarketer.
That doesn’t mean social doesn’t work. It means social has gotten very good at getting credit.
Last-click reporting certainly helped. Social sits close to the conversion, raises its hand and says, “That was me,” and the budget comes back next quarter.
Meanwhile, the streaming TV ad that started the search or the podcast ad that brought someone back gets left out of the story.
of US ad spending
of consumer media time
Social networks, US, 2026. Source: EMARKETER
Social gets the last click. That doesn’t mean it did all the work.
A customer might see a streaming TV ad, hear the brand again during a podcast, click a social ad three days later and finally search the company by name before buying.
Ask each platform what happened and you may get four confident answers, each claiming the whole conversion. The company still made one sale.
Social and search often collect demand because they sit near the end of the journey. Streaming can help create it by reaching people while they’re watching and listening.
Both jobs matter. The reporting should be honest about which one each channel did.
Streaming should answer the same questions as digital.
For years, putting performance budget into television or radio was basically a trust fall. Marketers picked a broad audience, ran the ads and waited to see whether sales moved.
Streaming should work differently.
The same toolkit marketers already use in digital can now follow the audience into streaming TV and audio. That includes customer lists, lookalikes, retargeting, household frequency control and conversion tracking.
It also means the reporting should answer questions that matter:
Can your media plan tell you:
- Where your customers spend their media time?
- Which apps and publishers received your streaming budget?
- Whether CTV ads actually landed on televisions?
- How often each household and audience saw the ad?
- Which website visits, form fills, calls, texts or sales followed?
- How credit was divided when several channels contributed?
“I have no idea” is a perfectly acceptable answer. It’s also usually the most useful one.
higher streaming RoAS
Measured on the retailer’s own sales data
The average looked fine. It wasn’t.
A national retailer ran one weekly frequency cap for parents and business buyers. The dashboard rolled them together, hiding that some households saw too many ads while others were barely reached.
Once frequency was separated by audience and controlled before each bid, streaming RoAS jumped. Nothing magical happened; we stopped pretending two very different buyers behaved the same way.
Give your media plan an honest look.
The goal isn’t to take a flamethrower to the social budget. Social works. Search works. Streaming TV and audio can work too.
The goal is to understand what each channel contributes, whether the budget reflects where customers spend their time and whether the reporting tells the whole story.
If several of the questions above produced a “no” or “I have no idea,” you’ve found something worth looking at.
