Croud VP says AI search TV awareness role grows as discovery shifts

The migration of users from traditional search engines to LLMs creates a discovery gap that digital performance marketing alone cannot fill. For streaming platforms and advertisers, this necessitates a pivot toward CTV as a primary awareness engine to influence AI training data and consumer intent early. As the ecosystem moves away from legacy GRP metrics, the pressure on ad tech providers like Tatari to deliver precise commerce attribution will intensify. Watch for whether brands increase their commitment to unskippable CTV inventory as a hedge against the shrinking visibility of standard search results.

Croud operates as a global digital media agency with particular strength in paid media and programmatic strategy, and its leadership has been vocal about how AI-driven search is reshaping the media mix. The firm has expanded its CTV practice significantly, advising clients on how to allocate budgets across addressable and programmatic television as digital touchpoints fragment. Kyle Christie, who leads Croud's TV and video strategy, has argued that brands must treat CTV as a top-of-funnel necessity rather than a performance channel, a stance that aligns with broader agency consensus emerging through 2025 and 2026. Croud was recognized among the top global media agencies in the 2025 COMvergence new business rankings, reflecting its growth trajectory in a market where agencies are being forced to rethink channel allocation as AI search erodes traditional digital touchpoints.

The business case for CTV awareness spending is being bolstered by measurement infrastructure that links TV exposure to downstream outcomes. Tatari secured a $60 million Series C funding round led by Volition Capital in October 2024, expanding its TV attribution and analytics platform that provides advertisers with incrementality-based measurement across linear and streaming inventory. That round valued the company at over $500 million and signaled investor confidence that full-funnel TV attribution would become a standard requirement rather than a premium add-on. Meanwhile, the IAB Tech Lab published its Addressable TV Measurement Framework in 2025 to standardize cross-platform deduplication for streaming ad exposure, providing a framework that agencies like Croud can reference when justifying awareness budgets to clients who demand accountability beyond GRPs.

Technical benchmarks and independent studies are beginning to quantify the awareness impact of unskippable CTV formats relative to skippable digital video. A 2025 study from the Video Advertising Bureau found that CTV ads generated significantly higher brand recall than skippable in-stream video, supporting the argument that unskippable environments deliver disproportionate top-of-mind lift. Additionally, Nielsen reported in its 2025 Annual Marketing Report that CTV ad completion rates averaged above 90 percent across major streaming platforms, a figure that contrasts sharply with the sub-50 percent completion rates typical of skippable pre-roll on open web video. These data points give agencies concrete evidence to support the strategic pivot that Christie describes, where CTV becomes the primary vehicle for ensuring brand presence before consumers enter AI-mediated discovery journeys.