Croud’s Kyle Christie: TV’s Awareness Role Grows as AI Shrinks the Ad-Supported Shopping Journey
CANNES, France — Artificial intelligence has been not-so-quietly reshaping all business activities and that includes the way television advertising is created, bought, sold, and measured.
Discovery is one of the areas most impacted within the context of TV campaigns. But as AI introduces new challenges, these tools also offer solutions.
“People are avoiding search more and more. Search is still a huge channel, but it’s seen declines because people are going right to these LLMs,” Kyle Christie, vp of strategy and planning at Croud, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at Cannes Lions. “The benefit for brands is leaning into top of mind awareness, having these awareness channels live so that when a consumer goes to one of those LLMs, you’re in the consideration set already.”
With fewer ad-supported touchpoints inside the AI-driven shopping journey, the window for breaking through to consumers is narrowing — making sustained TV presence a strategic necessity rather than a legacy habit.
Fragmentation’s story turns positive
The cord-cutting era sent audiences toward non-ad-supported environments, threatening TV’s advertising value. What’s emerged instead is a growing network of ad-supported CTV destinations that has actually expanded opportunity.
“The fragmentation is still ongoing, still continuing, but what’s been created are these networks of ad-supported CTV locations. Overall, the channel is exploding,” Christie said. “TV has become less of a left behind and more of just integrated into a kind of digital/traditional world.”
Tentpoles and attention remain TV’s edge
Social delivers efficient reach, but television’s unskippable, leaned-in environments give brands something harder to replicate — the ability to embed in cultural moments at scale.
“TV’s role is to break through. The ability for a message, and a longer form message especially, is kind of unparalleled on these unskippable channels,” Christie said. “TV is what allows a brand to integrate into those tentpoles in a way that is impactful. It’s the one that people remember and what gets that massive reach.”
Full-funnel attribution changes planning
The biggest evolution in TV strategy is connecting linear exposure to lower-funnel outcomes, moving beyond GRP goals and awareness metrics toward commerce attribution that satisfies performance-oriented clients.
“When I first started planning TV, reach and frequency was it. You were hitting a GRP goal. Now there’s a lot of different platforms out there that can help us attribute someone seeing a TV ad to a lower funnel dynamic,” Christie said. “These brands that want full funnel performance are not only satisfied anymore with just seeing an awareness increase. More and more, we have to prove out that media has an outcome that we can plan to.”
Splashy plans aren’t enough anymore
Brands that treat television purely as a reach vehicle will fall behind those building plans that tie cultural relevance and tentpole alignment directly to measurable business results.
“When TV is a channel that can break through, you have to think of it as more than just a reach driver. It needs to be closely tied to what’s going to resonate with the audience and tied to the lower funnel and what actual metric and business success it’s driving to,” Christie said. “The days of just having a really splashy media plan and getting your shareholders excited. That’s still exciting. But you need to do a little bit more than that.”
You’re watching “The New TV Equation”, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at POSSIBLE 2026, presented by Tatari. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
CANNES, France — Artificial intelligence has been not-so-quietly reshaping all business activities and that includes the way television advertising is created, bought, sold, and measured.
Discovery is one of the areas most impacted within the context of TV campaigns. But as AI introduces new challenges, these tools also offer solutions.
“People are avoiding search more and more. Search is still a huge channel, but it’s seen declines because people are going right to these LLMs,” Kyle Christie, vp of strategy and planning at Croud, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at Cannes Lions. “The benefit for brands is leaning into top of mind awareness, having these awareness channels live so that when a consumer goes to one of those LLMs, you’re in the consideration set already.”
With fewer ad-supported touchpoints inside the AI-driven shopping journey, the window for breaking through to consumers is narrowing — making sustained TV presence a strategic necessity rather than a legacy habit.
Fragmentation’s story turns positive
The cord-cutting era sent audiences toward non-ad-supported environments, threatening TV’s advertising value. What’s emerged instead is a growing network of ad-supported CTV destinations that has actually expanded opportunity.
“The fragmentation is still ongoing, still continuing, but what’s been created are these networks of ad-supported CTV locations. Overall, the channel is exploding,” Christie said. “TV has become less of a left behind and more of just integrated into a kind of digital/traditional world.”
Tentpoles and attention remain TV’s edge
Social delivers efficient reach, but television’s unskippable, leaned-in environments give brands something harder to replicate — the ability to embed in cultural moments at scale.
“TV’s role is to break through. The ability for a message, and a longer form message especially, is kind of unparalleled on these unskippable channels,” Christie said. “TV is what allows a brand to integrate into those tentpoles in a way that is impactful. It’s the one that people remember and what gets that massive reach.”
Full-funnel attribution changes planning
The biggest evolution in TV strategy is connecting linear exposure to lower-funnel outcomes, moving beyond GRP goals and awareness metrics toward commerce attribution that satisfies performance-oriented clients.
“When I first started planning TV, reach and frequency was it. You were hitting a GRP goal. Now there’s a lot of different platforms out there that can help us attribute someone seeing a TV ad to a lower funnel dynamic,” Christie said. “These brands that want full funnel performance are not only satisfied anymore with just seeing an awareness increase. More and more, we have to prove out that media has an outcome that we can plan to.”
Splashy plans aren’t enough anymore
Brands that treat television purely as a reach vehicle will fall behind those building plans that tie cultural relevance and tentpole alignment directly to measurable business results.
“When TV is a channel that can break through, you have to think of it as more than just a reach driver. It needs to be closely tied to what’s going to resonate with the audience and tied to the lower funnel and what actual metric and business success it’s driving to,” Christie said. “The days of just having a really splashy media plan and getting your shareholders excited. That’s still exciting. But you need to do a little bit more than that.”
You’re watching “The New TV Equation”, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at POSSIBLE 2026, presented by Tatari. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
Series Videos
