Your Customers Have Moved to Streaming — Your Ads Should Follow
Linear TV viewership has been declining for years. Meanwhile, households across the U.S. are spending more time on connected TV platforms — Hulu, Roku, Peacock, Amazon Fire TV, and dozens of others. If your ad budget still treats TV as a channel for national brands with deep pockets, you’re leaving a significant pipeline gap on the table.
CTV advertising for local business has fundamentally changed the math. What was once reserved for Fortune 500 media buys is now accessible to the HVAC company serving three zip codes, the med spa running monthly promotions, and the personal injury attorney competing in a dense metro market. Here’s how it works and why it’s becoming a core part of full-funnel strategy for service brands.
What CTV Advertising Actually Is (and How It’s Different from Linear TV)
Connected TV refers to any internet-connected device used to stream video content — smart TVs, streaming sticks, gaming consoles, and set-top boxes. CTV advertising is the delivery of video ad units within that streaming environment: the 15- or 30-second spots you see before or during shows on Hulu, Peacock, Tubi, and similar platforms.
The critical distinction from traditional broadcast or cable TV is targeting. Linear TV buys audiences by network, daypart, and program category. CTV buys audiences by zip code, household income, health condition interest, home ownership status, and hundreds of other data signals — and it does it programmatically. More than 80% of CTV ad dollars now flow through programmatic channels, which means local advertisers can access premium streaming inventory with the same granular targeting they’d use on Google or Meta.
That’s a structural change — not a trend. It’s why programmatic advertising for local and regulated brands increasingly centers CTV as a top-of-funnel demand driver rather than treating it as an afterthought.
The Numbers Behind CTV’s Rise Among Local and Regional Advertisers
The scale of adoption is hard to overstate. Connected TV ad spending in the U.S. is projected to reach $42.43 billion by 2027, up from $25.09 billion in 2023. That growth isn’t being driven solely by national brands — local and regional advertisers are accelerating their share of that spend.
According to IAB’s 2023 Video Ad Spend and Outlook report, 74% of advertisers increased their CTV and streaming budgets, with local and regional advertisers specifically citing audience targeting precision as the primary driver. That’s the signal worth paying attention to: local advertisers aren’t experimenting with CTV out of curiosity — they’re scaling it because it’s working.
Completion rates reinforce why. Average video completion rates on CTV exceed 90%, compared to roughly 70% on mobile web. When your 30-second spot runs on a connected TV, the viewer almost always watches it to the end — there’s no skip button on most CTV inventory. That’s a fundamentally different attention environment than display or pre-roll.
| Ad Format | Avg. Completion Rate | Skip Option Available | Geographic Targeting | Audience Data Depth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CTV / Streaming | >90% | Rarely | Zip code, DMA, city | High (HHI, interests, health, ownership) |
| Mobile Web Pre-Roll | ~70% | Often (after 5 sec) | DMA, city | Moderate |
| Linear TV (Cable/Broadcast) | Variable (DVR skip common) | Yes (DVR) | DMA only | Low (demo-based) |
| Display / Banner | N/A (impression-based) | N/A | Zip code, city | Moderate |
Why CTV Advertising Works Specifically for Local Service Brands
Local service businesses — dental practices, HVAC companies, med spas, personal injury firms — share a common challenge: most of their revenue comes from a tight geographic radius, but broad digital channels often waste spend outside that area. CTV solves this at the household level.
You can target by zip code, which means a roofing company in Columbus can serve ads exclusively to homeowners within their service territory — not the entire metro, and not the wrong income brackets. That precision extends to audience overlays: homeowners, households with children, people who have searched for relevant services, and even life-event triggers like recent movers. This is the same data infrastructure powering programmatic display, now applied to a TV-quality viewing environment.
The downstream effect on search is measurable. Over 70% of people who see a relevant CTV ad take a follow-up action — searching for the brand or visiting the advertiser’s website. For a service business running Google Ads that are optimized for conversion, this creates a compounding effect: CTV builds top-of-mind awareness, and paid search captures the intent that CTV generates. That’s a full-funnel loop, not a siloed channel buy.
Compliance Comes First for Regulated Industries Running CTV Ads
Healthcare providers, med spas, dental practices, financial services firms, and legal advertisers face a layer of complexity that most local brands don’t. CTV may feel newer and less scrutinized than search or social — but the rules apply fully here.
The FTC’s endorsement and advertising guidelines require that locally targeted ads for regulated industries include clear and conspicuous disclosures visible within the ad unit — not buried in a landing page footer. For healthcare and med spa brands in particular, claims about results, testimonials, or before-and-after outcomes need to meet disclosure standards inside the 15 or 30 seconds of the ad itself. Failing this isn’t just a legal risk; it’s a brand risk in a format where the viewer is watching at full attention.
An agency running CTV for regulated verticals needs to understand this at the creative brief stage — not after production. In-house creative with compliance review baked into the process is the difference between a campaign that scales and one that gets pulled. This is where working with a team that already handles SEO and paid media for regulated industries matters: compliance isn’t an afterthought, it’s built into the workflow.
How to Integrate CTV Into a Full-Funnel Strategy That Actually Drives Pipeline
CTV is a top-of-funnel and mid-funnel tool. It’s not a direct-response channel the way paid search is — but that’s the point. It warms audiences who don’t know you exist yet, and it reinforces credibility with audiences who have already visited your site or engaged with your brand.
The highest-leverage approach pairs CTV with retargeting and search. Run CTV to build awareness in your target zip codes. Layer a retargeting campaign that follows those viewers with display or social ads after they take that first action. Then let your paid search capture the bottom-funnel intent. Each layer does what it’s built for, and attribution across all three channels tells you where the pipeline is actually coming from.
For service businesses already investing in paid search or social, CTV is rarely a replacement — it’s an amplifier. The brands seeing the strongest ROAS from this model are the ones treating their channels as a system, not as separate line items. If your current agency can’t tell you how your CTV spend is influencing your search conversions, that’s a reporting gap worth closing.
Ready to see what a connected, full-funnel media plan looks like for your market? Book a strategy call with ETS Marketing Solutions to map your full-funnel growth plan — from CTV and programmatic down through paid search and SEO, built for your vertical and your geography.
Leave a Reply