CTV advertising that lands on a real television.

CTV advertising places video ads inside streaming content watched on an internet-connected television. You buy the household rather than a time slot, which is what makes household-level targeting and app-level reporting possible.

CTV stands for connected TV, which is a television connected to the internet, either built in, like a smart TV, or through a device such as a Roku, a Fire TV or a game console. If you've ever opened Hulu or Peacock on your living room TV, you've watched CTV. The ads in those apps are CTV ads, and they play on the biggest screen in the house.

OTT advertising is video advertising delivered over the internet through streaming services, on any connected screen. OTT stands for over-the-top, a name from the days when video skipped over the cable box to get to you. Today it covers the ads you see on Hulu, Peacock, Tubi and Prime Video, whether you're watching on a TV, a phone or a laptop. CTV advertising is the part of OTT that runs on televisions, so if you want your ad on the big screen, that's the part to ask about.

OTT describes how video is delivered, over the internet instead of cable or satellite, and CTV describes where it's watched, on a television. Think of OTT as the delivery truck and CTV as the living room it pulls up to. Every CTV ad is an OTT ad, but an OTT ad can also play on a phone, a tablet or a laptop. Mixing the two up is common, and the difference matters most when you want to know where your ads actually ran.

Netflix is an OTT service, and it counts as CTV only when someone watches on a television, not on a phone. So the same show can be CTV on the couch at 8 p.m. and plain OTT on the train at 8 a.m. That's a fair thing to find confusing, and it's the reason a CTV buy should confirm every ad ran on a TV.

CTV ads are the commercials that play before and during shows and movies in streaming apps on a TV, in apps such as Hulu, Peacock, Prime Video, Tubi and Roku. You've probably watched plenty of them without calling them CTV: the ad before your favorite show starts, or the break halfway through it.

In the ad breaks of streaming apps on the television: Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, Max, Tubi, Roku, Pluto TV, Philo, Sling, DirecTV Stream, Samsung, Xumo and Vizio among others, all through direct publisher relationships. We also buy real cable networks programmatically through Xfinity, Dish and DirecTV, which very few platforms can actually deliver. See the full list.

Inventory sold as CTV sometimes does, because those impressions are cheaper to source and the report rarely makes it obvious. Every impression we run appears on a television screen, and the app name sits on every line of your reporting, so you can check rather than take our word for it.

You start from the households you want to reach: location, income, life stage, purchase intent, or your own customer data, matched and scrubbed of personal detail. The segments come from established data partners including Experian, TransUnion, LiveRamp and Nielsen.

You set a cap at the household, and GammaRay, our own bidder, checks that household's exposure and stops bidding once it has been reached. Because that happens before the bid rather than after the invoice, the impression that would have gone over is never bought.

By what actually delivered: impressions and completions by publisher and app, households reached, average frequency, and time of day. Conversions are credited across every streaming publisher that reached the converting household, so you can see what each one contributed instead of only the last app seen.

Start with one question: who do you want to reach? From there, we build that audience from data, place your ads in streaming TV apps, and send reports by app and publisher, so you can see where every ad ran. You don't need to know the jargon to get started, and there are no silly questions. Tell us who you're trying to reach and we'll plan the rest.

Yes, and there are two ways to do it. Bring your customer list, and we match it to households, or retarget people who visited your website using their IP address. Either way, you reach people who already know you on the biggest screen in the house. Think of it as a friendly follow-up: they've met you before, and now they see you again at home, with the same frequency control as the rest of your campaign.

Every CTV impression we deliver runs on a real television, and your report names the app, so you can see exactly where it played. You shouldn't have to take anyone's word for it, ours included, and a good report lets you check. We also block invalid impressions before they count against your spend, and you can see how we block invalid impressions.

CTV advertising is commonly priced by CPM, the cost per thousand ad impressions, so your cost depends on how many impressions you buy. CPM is a fancy way of saying “price per thousand times your ad shows up.” For published ranges and a worked budget example, see how much a 30-second local TV ad costs and how streaming compares. Your own cost depends on how large an area you need to cover and how often you need to reach each household, so on a strategy call we'll show you the reach your budget actually buys before you commit anything.