In the early days of CTV, limited inventory and high CPMs meant that CTV advertising was the province of big brands with big production budgets. The lawyers, the auto dealerships, and the mom and pop shops were largely shut out.
But as CTV has expanded, so has the type of advertiser.
Thanks to technology from companies like Madhive that make it easier to buy, sell and target local audiences, local advertisers are now spending more of their budgets on CTV, as well.
How can you convince the local laggards that advertising on CTV is worth a go? Try these five reasons.
Cable and satellite TV use has dropped dramatically over the past decade. Only 56% of Americans say they still watch TV via cable or satellite (down from 76% in 2015). Statista reports that by the end of 2022, more than 39.3 million U.S. households will have cut the cord from traditional pay TV (the number of cord cutters is expected to reach 46.6 million households by 2024).
On the other hand, 78% of consumers subscribe to a subscription video on demand (SVOD) service like Netflix or Hulu (a 25% increase over the past five years).
The result is that, for the first time ever, Americans are watching more TV from streaming services than either broadcast or cable TV. According to Nielsen, July 2022 TV streaming in American households represented a record 34.8% share of total consumption, while cable and broadcast came in at only 34.4% and 21.6%, respectively.
The takeaway:
As these trends continue, advertising on CTV will only become more important. Follow the eyeballs to CTV or risk continually decreasing returns on advertising investments.
Advertisers don’t have too many options for finding specific audiences or measuring impact with traditional TV (and who has the budget for ambiguous ROI these days?).
It’s ever so much easier (and more accurate) with advertising on CTV.
Instead of buying ads based on the predicted make-up of specific networks and programs, CTV allows local advertisers to hyper target audiences with specific criteria like:
Primary demographics:
Advanced demographics:
Event-based Demographics
Once they find the exact people they’re looking for, local advertisers can clearly determine who saw each ad (with accurate video completion rates) — and which of these people then made a purchase (online and in store). This helps advertisers improve their return on ad spend and reduce waste by ensuring they reach the right audience each time.
For example, a leading quick service restaurant brand used footfall attribution to measure CTV performance across several key geographies. Out of all the people that saw the brand’s CTV ads, the fast-food chain could see which people then visited their local restaurant. They also had data on which creative, publishers, dates, etc. worked best in each region to get diners into their restaurants.
Check out the full case study: TV broadcaster debuts streaming advertising platform, achieves 600% revenue growth
Speaking of data, it’s no secret that finding audiences online is getting harder these days. With third-party cookies and other identifiers disappearing, many advertisers are reverting back to less effective contextual targeting (a la linear TV). That nearly defeats the whole point of digital advertising!
Thankfully, CTV advertising does not rely on deprecating technology like third-party cookies. Businesses advertising on CTV will still be able to target highly-specific audiences using privacy-centric strategies like first-party data, device graphs, and data clean rooms.
The ultra-precise targeting that comes with advertising on CTV also eliminates the artificial limitations of geographic DMAs.
For example, an auto dealership that wants to target residents of Manchester, New Hampshire on linear TV is stuck with a slice of southern New Hampshire and all of Eastern Massachusetts. But let’s be honest—few people are coming from Cape Cod to New Hampshire to buy a car. Most of those TV ad views will be wasted.
Image: Media Market Map
Advertising on CTV allows advertisers to reach exactly the audiences they want to reach, regardless of DMA. In fact, CTV advertisers can even target beyond the specific zip code, right down to the targeted household.
Related content: Auto Dealership Marketing: 5 Reasons to Add CTV to the Mix
Advertising on linear TV also presents the advertiser with limitations based on cable/satellite providers and networks.
For example, there are three different cable companies that serve the city of Dallas, Texas, plus two different satellite TV providers. If the local credit union advertises with Spectrum, they’ll automatically miss all of the people in Dallas that subscribe to Astound Broadband or Sparklight cable services, as well as those using DIRECTV or DISH.
Conversely, CTV ads can reach anyone that watches TV via the internet — and that can mean some seriously extended reach beyond a single cable provider.
Unlike advertising on traditional TV, advertising on CTV presents surprisingly low barriers to entry. There’s no need for giant budget commitments, which makes CTV the perfect channel to test and learn, then scale up as results roll in.
There’s also plenty of flexibility on what to buy. If the new dental practice down the street wants to buy time during news programming, there are different types of news programs to choose from, different pricing (from inexpensive to premium), options for which devices to serve on, etc. The result is plenty of opportunities to experiment.
Never done TV advertising before? No worries — you don’t have to be a legacy linear TV spender to get started advertising on CTV.
If you need a few more compelling reasons for advertising on CTV, check out and share 4 benefits of OTT advertising you don’t want to miss.
