3 Reasons Local Auto Dealerships Are Moving Budgets to CTV

Historically, the kings of local broadcast television have been auto dealerships. Drive down any American highway, turn on any local news station, and you are guaranteed to hear a dealership owner yelling about weekend clearance events.

But the tide is turning. Massive automotive groups and independent lots alike are realizing the deep flaws of traditional TV and shifting huge portions of their advertising budgets directly into Connected TV (CTV). Here's why.

1. Eliminating Out-of-Market Waste

When a dealership buys a local broadcast ad, they are paying for everyone in the Designated Market Area (DMA) to see it. If the dealership is located in the northern suburbs, they are paying a premium to show ads to viewers an hour south who will never make the drive.

CTV completely eliminates this. Dealerships can target viewers solely within a specific 15-mile radius, or hyper-target specific zip codes where they know their demographic lives. Every advertising dollar stays local.

2. Targeting "In-Market" Buyers

Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of CTV for auto dealers is behavioral targeting. Instead of showing a Ford F-150 ad to an 18-year-old college student renting an apartment, dealers can use data to layer their targeting.

With CTV BOSS, a dealership can choose to show their commercial only to households that have a household income above $80,000, have a lease expiring within 6 months, and have recently searched for trucks online. This means the ad is highly relevant (and welcome), drastically increasing conversion rates.

3. Direct Website Attribution

For decades, dealers would run a TV ad and then look at their weekend lot traffic to guess if it worked. It was an incredibly imperfect science.

Through CTV Performance Marketing, we track exactly who viewed the commercial on their living room TV, and whether that same household subsequently visited the dealership's website on their laptop or phone to check inventory. We can track the cost-per-site-visit down to the penny.