The one-sentence version: you pay per impression — one real person's TV actually playing your commercial — measured as a price per 1,000 views (CPM). No giant upfront, no production crew, no wasted spend on people outside your area.
You pay per impression, not per “spot”
On CTV you don't buy a vague 30-second slot. You buy impressions, and an impression is one real household's TV playing your commercial — usually unskippable, full-screen, inside a show they're watching. Cost is measured as CPM: the price per 1,000 impressions.
A simple example
Say you budget a few hundred dollars for the neighborhoods around your business. At a typical CPM, a few hundred dollars buys roughly ten thousand impressions — and with a sensible frequency cap, that's a few thousand local homes getting to know your business, on premium streaming apps, on the living-room screen. Real neighborhood saturation for about the price of a modest mailer run — and far more memorable.
How to stretch a local budget
Tight geography
Only show the ad where your customers are. No paying to reach the next county over.
Frequency caps
A cap of ~3–4 views per household builds recognition without overspending on the same home.
Run in flights
Concentrate impressions around your busy season or a promotion, rather than thinly all month.
No crew, no giant upfront
Traditional TV made you spend thousands just to produce a commercial before buying any airtime. CTV removes that wall: a modern spot is built from your photos and info, and you can start small and scale up once you see it working. No long contracts, no cable-sized minimums.
Put your business on TV.
Build your first commercial in minutes — see it before you spend a dollar.
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