Social nets 27.7% of US ad spend on just 12.5% of attention, eMarketer says

August 22, 2026 · AdExchanger

Convergent TV, linear and CTV combined, absorbs 38.5% of the average American's media day and draws only 18% of ad budgets, according to eMarketer figures cited by Tatari's Vicky Chang in AdExchanger. Social networks sit at the other end of the scale, holding 12.5% of media time and 27.7% of spend. Chang points to a Tatari analysis of 100 brands measured on social-driven traffic: nine in ten got higher conversion rates from visitors who had seen a TV ad during the prior week, six in ten saw lift above 50%, and a third saw conversions more than double. "The customer converts on Meta, so Meta's dashboard claims the victory," Chang writes.

Budgets keep tracking toward platforms that produce a defensible ROAS number, even when their attribution models take credit for conversions that would have happened anyway. Meta and Google have built brand-lift studies, multi-touch attribution and search lift inside their own walled gardens, and the money follows that proof. Streaming platforms sit at earlier and later stages of the same build-out: Amazon has advanced with shopping-signal enhanced attribution across its DSP, while others are still assembling the infrastructure to make an equivalent case. Each platform's measurement stays locked to its own methodology, so buyers still lack a common yardstick for where the next dollar creates the most lift. Chang's fix is independent, cross-platform measurement that scores TV and social against the same standard.