What Is CTV Advertising? CTV vs OTT Explained

Somebody on your couch tonight is going to watch a show on a streaming app and sit through a commercial for a mattress company, a car dealer, or a national insurance brand. Ten years ago that break belonged to whoever could afford a broadcast schedule. Today it is sold by the household, in the neighborhoods an advertiser picks, and a roofing company with four trucks can be the one in the break. Most owners I talk to still think that screen is out of reach. It is not. They just have not been told how it is bought.

I am the CEO of Killerspots, and I have spent my career on both sides of the television screen: producing commercials in our studio since 1999, and on camera as an on-air personality for a CBS affiliate. Our team plans and runs CTV and streaming TV ad campaigns for service businesses and brands across the country, and the spots they run were shot and cut in the same studio. This guide covers what CTV advertising actually is, how it differs from OTT, how a campaign gets targeted, bought and measured, and the honest cases where I would tell you not to spend the money.

What is CTV advertising?

Connected TV is the television itself, connected to the internet. When a family opens a streaming app on a smart TV or a plug-in device and picks a show on an ad-supported plan, the breaks inside that show are filled by an ad server, not a station’s traffic department. That server decides, in real time, which commercial each household sees based on where the TV is and what the advertiser asked for.

That one change in plumbing is the whole story. A broadcast station sells the same break to everyone in its signal area at once, so the price reflects the whole market. A streaming break is sold home by home. The viewer sees a commercial that looks and feels exactly like TV, because it is TV. The advertiser bought it the way you buy digital media, with a target, a budget and a report.

The spots are the same length as always, fifteen or thirty seconds, sometimes sixty. They play full-screen with the sound on, and on premium inventory the viewer cannot skip them. That is what separates CTV from the video ads people scroll past on their phones. The attention is the living-room kind.

What is the difference between CTV and OTT?

The two terms get used as if they were interchangeable, and sales decks are the worst offenders. They are not the same thing, and the difference changes what you are buying. OTT describes the delivery: video that goes over the top of the traditional cable or satellite box and arrives over the internet. A streaming show watched on a tablet at the kitchen table is OTT. The same show on the sixty-five inch screen in the family room is OTT and CTV at the same time.

When an advertiser asks us for CTV, they are asking for the television. The big screen, the shared viewing, the full-screen non-skippable break. When a proposal says OTT without saying more, it may include mobile and desktop impressions, which are cheaper to buy and worth less to a brand that wants the authority of a TV spot. The ad still ran. It just ran on a six-inch screen in someone’s pocket, with the sound possibly off.

So the question to ask any vendor, including us, is simple: what share of the impressions will land on a television screen? A CTV buy should answer that with a number near all of them. A mixed OTT buy should say so up front and price accordingly. Neither is wrong. Buying one while believing you bought the other is.

Where do CTV ads actually run?

The inventory is the content people already pay attention to. Ad-supported plans on the major streaming services carry commercial breaks, and those breaks are bookable. Free ad-supported streaming channels, the ones that come built into a smart TV, carry more. Live sports streams carry some of the highest-attention inventory on any screen, because nobody is scrolling during a fourth-quarter drive, and we run OTT sports campaigns for advertisers who want their spot next to the game rather than next to a sitcom rerun.

We get asked which platforms a local business can even buy, and the honest answer surprises people: most of the ones they watch. Premium streaming inventory is available to local advertisers, geo-targeted, at the kind of budgets a regional business can carry. The service page names the platforms we run. The reason you have not seen your competitor there is usually that nobody told them it was possible, not that it was closed to them.

One thing we do not do is name the buying technology behind the inventory in a client’s report or on a client’s site. The platform a viewer sees is what matters to the business. The pipes are our job.

How is a CTV campaign targeted?

Geography is the layer that makes streaming TV work for a service business. Before a campaign launches we define exactly where the spot is allowed to run: a list of ZIP codes, a designated market area, or a radius around a shop or a service territory. A company that does not drive past a certain highway does not pay to reach anyone on the other side of it. That alone removes most of the waste that made broadcast TV a mass-reach product.

Audience is the second layer. Household data lets the buy favor homeowners for a remodeler, vehicle owners for a dealer, parents for a pediatric practice, or people who have been shopping a category for a dental implant provider. These are household profiles, not individuals, and they stack on top of the geography rather than replacing it. Content is a third layer: run inside live sports, or inside a genre, or avoid certain programming entirely.

Then comes the part most first-time advertisers skip, which is frequency. A household that sees your spot twice a week for a month remembers you. A household that sees it six times in one evening resents you and tells the room. We set a cap on how many times each home sees the commercial, and we size the campaign against the budget so the plan says, in plain terms, how many households it will reach and how often, before a dollar runs.

How do you buy CTV advertising, and what does it cost?

There is no sales rep calling about a Thursday night package. CTV inventory is purchased programmatically, which means an advertiser, or the agency acting for them, sets the target, the budget and the schedule, and the ad server fills breaks that match. The agency’s job is to pick the inventory, build the audience, manage pacing so the budget spends evenly across the flight, hold the frequency cap, and keep the spot away from content the brand should not sit beside.

Pricing moves on the same levers as any media. A bigger geography costs more because there are more homes. Premium content and live sports cost more per thousand than general entertainment. A tightly defined audience costs more per impression and wastes fewer of them. We never publish rates, because a plumber in a mid-size market and a hospital system in three states are not buying the same thing, and any number on a page would be wrong for both. What we will do on a call is forecast reach and cost for your exact territory and budget, in writing, before you commit.

If you are deciding how streaming fits beside a broadcast schedule, our guide to broadcast TV versus Connected TV is the companion to this post: it covers the split between reach and precision. And if you are starting from zero on television, how TV advertising works and what drives its cost covers production and airtime together.

What does the creative need to look like?

The media buy is the easy half. The spot is where campaigns get won or quietly lost. A commercial that was shot for a phone, with text crammed into the corners and a logo that appears for the last second, looks small and cheap on a sixty-five inch screen next to a national brand’s spot. Viewers do not consciously judge production quality. They judge whether the business looks like one they would trust, and on a TV screen that judgment is made in the first three seconds.

We produce the TV commercial and run the campaign as one job, which is the way it should be done, because the person planning the buy knows how the spot will be seen. Our commercials are shot in our green screen studio in Cincinnati and finished for broadcast specifications, and the same master gets cut to fifteen and thirty for streaming. If you already have a broadcast spot, a cutdown is usually all that is needed. If you have a jingle, it belongs in the spot, because the sound is on and recall is the point.

Two craft notes that come from watching a lot of streaming breaks. Put the business name on screen early and leave it there, because a viewer who looks down at their phone and back up should still know who is talking. And end on one action, a phone number or a short web address, not three. The companion piece on media buying mistakes that drain local ad budgets covers what happens when the same creative gets pushed to every channel unchanged.

How do you know a CTV campaign worked?

This is where CTV earns its place over broadcast. A broadcast schedule reports an estimated audience. A streaming campaign reports what happened in each home it reached. Completed-view rate tells you whether people sat through the spot, and on non-skippable inventory that number runs high enough that a weak result usually points at the creative, not the placement. Reach and frequency tell you how many homes you covered and how often, which is the check against the plan you approved.

The number owners care about is attribution. With a pixel on the website, the platform matches households that were served the commercial against households that later showed up on the site, filled out a form or clicked to call, within a window after the exposure. That is view-through attribution, and it is the closest thing television has ever had to a direct answer on whether the spend produced customers. For larger campaigns a brand recall survey measures lift in awareness on top of the behavior data.

What we tell clients to ignore is the headline impression count. It is the number vendors lead with because it is always large. It proves the ad was served. Watch completed views, matched conversions, and the lift in branded search and inbound calls across the flight dates. If those move, the campaign worked. If only the impression count moved, something in the targeting, the creative or the offer needs fixing, and a managed campaign fixes it mid-flight instead of at the post-mortem.

When should a business not run CTV ads?

I would rather lose a sale than put a client on a channel that will not pay. A business that serves two neighborhoods does not have enough households to run a meaningful campaign, and the budget would be better spent on geo-fenced mobile ads around those blocks or on search. A business with no commercial and no appetite to produce one should wait, because a bad spot on a big screen does damage that a good media plan cannot undo. And a business whose phones go to voicemail at four in the afternoon is going to pay for awareness that evaporates before anyone picks up.

The other honest caveat is intent. Someone watching a show is not searching for a plumber at that moment. CTV plants the name so that when the water heater fails, the homeowner searches your name instead of the category. That is a different job from the one Google Ads or Meta ads do, and the businesses that get the most from streaming TV run it alongside search, not instead of it. Companies in our home market can see how we build the spot and the plan together on our Cincinnati video production page; the process is the same in every market we serve.

Where to start

Write down the ZIP codes you actually serve, the one thing you want a homeowner to remember about your business, and whether you have a finished video spot or need one. Those three answers are most of a CTV media plan. From there we forecast the households, the frequency and the cost for your territory, show you the inventory, and build the commercial if you need it.

If you have been told television is out of reach, send us your service area and we will come back with a real plan for streaming TV ads in the neighborhoods you work, with the numbers in writing and nothing in it you do not need.