TV’s long-anticipated demise as the largest channel in advertising appears to finally be upon us, as brand dollars shift to more measurable retail ad formats.

Advertising giant WPP, the agency holding company whose agencies include Ogilvy and AKQA, projects that spending on commerce ads — which includes retail, travel and financial services — exceeded TV spending in 2025, a watershed moment for the advertising industry.

“TV has long been seen as the premier ad market, but it's abundantly clear by now that digital performance advertising has completely overtaken it--first with search, then social, and now retail media,” media analyst Andrew Lipsman, author of the Media, Ads + Commerce newsletter, tells The Outcome.

Commerce is expected to further outpace TV in the coming year, according to the WPP report. Commerce will account for 15.9 percent of global ad spending in 2026, WPP projects, up from 15.6% in 2025. Linear and connected television will make up 13.9 percent of global ad spend in 2026, down from 15.8 percent in 2025.

The general consensus is that this tectonic shift is driven by retail media’s superior measurement capabilities, specifically the ability to connect retail ads to sales, and thus measure ad campaigns in terms of how effective they are at driving consumers to purchase the brand.

Since the mid-20th century, television has been the premiere channel in all of advertising, offering brands both reach and a rich creative medium for showcasing their wares. The knock on television has always been that it is notoriously hard to measure, especially for lower-funnel metrics such as conversions.

The advent of digital advertising, however, promised advertisers more precise measurement, less ad waste and more direct link between their ads and consumers’ purchase behaviors. Ad technology has now matured to the point brands can now measure their campaigns in terms of business outcomes — that is, did their ads actually convince consumers to buy. Return on advertising spend, the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising, has become the predominant metric in advertising.

The link between ads and outcomes is strongest for commerce ads, thus causing brands to direct more spend to the channel.

What this means for TV as an advertising medium is a matter of debate. For Kevin Simonson, CEO at ecommerce marketing agency AdMixt, Commerce overtaking TV is “not a surprise.” The shift in ad dollars correlates with consumers watching less traditional TV and shifting their attention to social media and streaming video.

“Incremental measurement of linear TV is arguably the best it has ever been, and the data shows that social and streaming are better from a performance perspective,” Simonson adds.

Rachel Dillon, EVP of sales at Strategus, says that the spending shift isn’t a sign of TV’s waning relevance — “TV remains one of the strongest brand-building channels available” — so much as it is that commerce has surpassed TV in terms of measurability. And with budgets tight and marketing teams under pressure to deliver results, brands are more likely to choose the ad format that can exhibit bottom-line results.

“The future isn’t about choosing between TV and commerce, it's about combining the two,” Dillon says. “The advertisers who win will be those who use TV for what it does best, while enhancing it with commerce data and measurement to meet modern performance expectations.”

In this sense, TV, particularly connected TV, the latest iteration of the platform, can compete with commerce by becoming more data-driven and tying viewers’ CTV exposures to their purchases.

“CTV isn’t being ‘replaced’ by commerce,” Keith Petri, SVP of Data & Identity at Viant, an AI ad-bying platform. “Cross-screen measurement that captures exposure and attribution across the entire customer journey is where CTV earns its rightful credit, rather than in isolated bottom-of-funnel ‘last click’ models.”

The future of advertising then, isn’t so much TV versus commerce, but the fusion of two, with the brand-building power of TV combined with the measurability of retail ads.