As AI Degrades the Path to Customers, CTV Is How Brands Reach Them

In a new world of AI-driven discovery, brands are encountering unique challenges to finding and winning customers. When Google serves an AI Overview, 83% of those searches end without a single click, choking off the traffic and conquesting power that brands once pulled from search. Social isn’t faring better: Gartner found 72% of consumers believe AI content generators spread false or misleading information, and trust in the feed keeps slipping. Demand capture and demand generation, the engine of digital marketing for the last decade, are losing ground at the same time.

So where do brands win now? On the biggest screen in the house. Connected TV generates demand instead of just capturing it, building the familiarity that leads viewers to seek out a brand out directly. Trust is the throughline: while confidence in AI-filled feeds erodes, 46% of adults rank TV the most trustworthy ad channel of any medium. And that trust pays off. LG Ad Solutions found 94% of viewers are more likely to buy a brand the next time they’re in-market after seeing its enhanced CTV ad. As search and social keep losing ground, CTV has become performance marketing’s most reliable pillar.

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