WARC Report: TV's real impact on your funnel

This newsletter comes from the hosts of The Marketing Architects, a research-first show answering your biggest marketing questions. Find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts!

Welcome to a special edition of Marketing Blueprints. Today, we're sharing insights from our new research report with WARC, "TV as a Full-Funnel Channel: An Evidence-Based Guide to Understanding Television's Impact." 

—Elena

 

TV's true impact was hiding in plain sight.      

Marketing is caught in what experts call the "advertising doom loop." Budget pressures push teams toward quick wins. Short-term thinking cuts brand investment. Growth eventually stalls. 

Meanwhile, TV sits misunderstood and undervalued. Attribution models credit search with nearly 3x its actual impact while undercounting TV by 90%. Marketers chase clicks and leave long-term value on the table. 

This attribution gap is causing marketers to underinvest in their most powerful growth driver. Here's what the research shows TV is really doing: 

1. TV works across the entire funnel. Research shows that at any given time 95% of your audience isn’t ready to buy in a B2B setting. That future demand can only be captured by brand-building channels like TV. Strong brand ads deliver in both the short and the long, with 92% of equity-building TV ads also performing well for sales activation. 
   
   
2. TV makes other channels work harder. TV lifts the efficiency of paid search, digital, and direct mail. Analytic Partners found that 30% of search clicks are triggered by other media. TV generates the demand that performance channels convert. Emotion builds memory, and memory makes activation more efficient, especially when they are integrated well. 
   
   
3. Budget allocation drives results. The best-performing advertisers allocate 30-70% of spend to brand building. Research from BERA.ai shows equity-building delivers higher returns than performance marketing across both online and offline channels. The full value emerges over time as brand investment influences future buyers. 
   
   
4. Creative quality multiplies growth.  An analysis of 57,000 TV ads revealed that dull creative would need an extra $189 billion in spend to match the market share growth that emotionally engaging ads deliver naturally. The lesson is clear: emotional resonance drives efficiency, not just engagement.

The path forward combines proven fundamentals with full-funnel thinking. Successful advertisers balance brand building with performance activation. They measure TV's indirect effects as well as direct response. Above all, they treat TV as the cornerstone that strengthens and amplifies every other channel. 

 

Read the report.