TV doesn't just build awareness. It drives action.
That's the case EDO President and CEO Kevin Krim made at POSSIBLE 2026 in Miami, sitting down with Beet.TV to discuss why TV deserves credit for driving demand, why live sports drives the whole ecosystem, and how AI is reshaping ad creative and data access.
Click on the screenshot below to check out the video at Beet.TV, or read our takeaways from Kevin's conversation here.
The industry has long treated TV as a top-of-funnel awareness play and left the credit for driving conversions to search and social. Kevin states that framing is outdated. "TV is a brand and demand medium," he said. After people see a TV ad, EDO sees them search the brand, visit the site, open the app, and even ask AI chatbots about what caught their eye. Those mid-funnel behaviors, Kevin argues, are the right way to score TV. They offer "a universal performance metric that also reflects brand loyalty and brand impact in a way that gives fair credit to the media owner and fair credit to the marketer."
Live sports is where that effect shows up loudest. EDO's data shows people engage with ads in live sports at significantly higher rates than with any other kind of content. "Live sports and other live events are really the engine that drives this ecosystem," Kevin said.
On AI's growing role in creative, Kevin pushed back on some of the louder industry hype. Humans stay at the center. "Taste and judgment are just unique human traits," he said. But AI is bringing production costs down and making it easy to produce many more versions of an ad than before. The old rule of needing one or two perfect creatives, he argued, was a scarcity mindset that no longer holds up. The better play: make a lot of options, then let real-time performance data show which ones land for which audiences.
EDO is also opposing this scarcity mindset in helping agencies with their Upfront planning. ChatEDO, the company's LLM-powered interface, puts a database of 375 million ad airings and 2.6 million creatives at users' fingertips and returns answers "in 15, 30 seconds instead of minutes or hours." Kevin compares the shift to climbing Maslow's hierarchy. At the bottom, agencies and brands are stuck hunting for basic share-of-voice numbers. At the top, they're focused on optimization and ROI. AI's job is to get the industry up that pyramid faster.
Watch Kevin's full conversation on Beet.TV, and explore EDO's latest insights on streaming and linear TV measurement.