Streaming TV Advertising: The Complete Guide for Car Dealers
Streaming TV Advertising: The Complete Guide for Car Dealers
What Is Streaming TV Advertising?
Streaming TV advertising places a dealership’s commercial inside the shows people watch on smart TVs, Roku, Apple TV, Fire Stick, and gaming consoles. Unlike traditional TV, the spots are bought against specific households instead of time slots. Sales are then matched back to the households that saw the ad, so a dealer sees cost per sale rather than ratings.
In May 2026, streaming took 48.6% of all TV viewing. Broadcast and cable together took 39.6%. [1]
That gap didn’t exist a year ago. Streaming passed broadcast and cable combined for the first time in May 2025, by six tenths of a point, and it never gave the lead back. [2] YouTube by itself is now 13.8% of everything watched on television, a bigger share than any other distributor. Traditional pay TV reaches only 41% of households, while 91% of internet households pay for at least one streaming service. [3]
Most dealers heard that and changed nothing, because “TV” still sounds like a rate card, a station rep who shows up in March, and a number nobody can tie back to a car sale. So the budget stays where it’s always been: at the bottom of the funnel, chasing shoppers who already know your name.
That reflex is expensive. Streaming TV reaches the households that haven’t started shopping yet, and it ties what you spend back to sales matched at the household level.
Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
- Streaming reached 48.6% of all TV viewing in May 2026 against 39.6% for broadcast and cable combined, and 91% of U.S. internet households subscribe to at least one streaming service. [1] [3]
- Streaming TV is the channel the ad industry calls CTV or OTT. Slightly different definitions, one thing you’re buying.
- It targets households, not time slots: ZIP code, city, county, and DMA, layered with in-market audiences, Experian data, your own customer lists, and pixel-based retargeting.
- Streaming runs around a $30 CPM in market. Broadcast is still the cheapest reach on your plan, with local placements as low as roughly $5 CPM.
- Loading the top of the funnel makes the bottom cheaper. Paid search converts 22% better, paid social 9%, email 19%. [4]
What Is Streaming TV Advertising?
Streaming TV advertising places your dealership’s commercial inside the shows people watch on smart TVs, Roku, Apple TV, Fire Stick, and gaming consoles. Unlike traditional TV, the spots are bought against specific households instead of time slots, and sales get matched back to the homes that saw the ad.
That’s the whole shift in one sentence. You’re no longer buying a program and hoping the right people are watching. You’re buying the household.
For a franchise store, that changes what TV is for. It stops being the brand line item you defend at budget season and starts behaving like a performance channel that sits alongside your paid search and paid social, feeding both.
Streaming TV, CTV, OTT, Broadcast: What Each Term Means
You’ll hear five or six words for what are really two things. Vendors use them loosely, which makes comparing proposals harder than it should be.
Source: Nielsen’s The Gauge, May 2026. Copyright The Nielsen Company.
Worth noticing in that breakdown: YouTube by itself accounts for 13.8% of all television watch-time, a larger share than any other distributor on television. When a dealer says nobody watches TV anymore, this is the chart that answers it.
| Term | What it actually is |
| Broadcast / Linear | Traditional over-the-air, cable, or satellite TV on a fixed schedule. Everyone sees the same spot at the same time. |
| Streaming TV | Television delivered over the internet and watched on demand. Targeted to households, not time slots. |
| CTV (Connected TV) | The TV-set half of streaming. A smart TV, or a standard set connected through Roku, Fire Stick, or a game console. |
| OTT (Over the Top) | The full umbrella. Everything CTV covers, plus streaming on phones, tablets, and computers, which is why OTT can drive direct clicks. |
| SVOD | Subscription services with no ads or a paid ad-free tier. Max, Disney+, Netflix. |
| AVOD / FAST | Ad-supported and free ad-supported services. Tubi, Pluto TV, the Roku Channel, and the ad tiers inside Hulu and Disney+. |
Dealers United says Streaming TV because that’s what it is to the person watching it. If a rep hands you a proposal for CTV or OTT, they’re selling you the same channel with a different label on the invoice.
The distinction matters less to your shopper than it does to your media plan. Someone watching a show on Peacock and someone watching the ten o’clock news are both watching TV. Americans spend 3.7 hours a day doing it, which makes it the single biggest daily media activity there is. [5]
You thought it was TikTok, didn’t you?
How a Streaming TV Buy Actually Works
Two Streaming TV proposals can carry the same CPM and buy completely different things. The gap is inventory quality, and it’s where most dealer money gets wasted.
Premium networks versus whatever’s cheapest. Your spot can run inside ESPN, Peacock, Max, HGTV, or CBS, or it can run inside a free ad-supported app nobody’s actively watching. The free, ad-cluttered apps will take anyone’s money. A premium channel might cost more, but it also tends to have a more qualified audience. Ask for the network list before you sign anything.
Unskippable 15 and 30 second spots. This is full-screen television inside content people chose to watch, not skippable pre-roll they’re waiting out. Dealers United buys across 150+ premium networks so the spot lands in programming worth sitting through.
Three formats are available. In-stream is the standard commercial that plays before, during, or after a show, and it’s what most dealer campaigns run. Companion ads place text or images around the video without interrupting it. Interactive formats add elements like an on-screen QR code, which is worth testing on a specific offer but shouldn’t carry the campaign.
Priced on CPM, not per spot. Streaming TV is bought on cost per thousand impressions, so budget scales with how many households you want to reach rather than how many times a station airs your commercial. Auto campaigns typically land around a $30 CPM.
For a single-rooftop store, you can start smaller on Streaming TV than on broadcast because you’re paying for a defined audience instead of a whole market.
Targeting: Reaching the Households Most Likely to Buy
Traditional TV asks you to pick a program and hope the right people are watching. Streaming TV asks a better question: which households do you want, and where do they live?
Start with geography. You can target down to a list of ZIP codes, a city, a county, or a full DMA. Dealers United builds most dealer campaigns on ZIP lists, because a ZIP list follows how people actually shop rather than drawing a neat circle around the store. Radius targeting is available when a store needs it, though it takes extra setup.
Then layer the audience. Six types do the work:
- Browsing behavior built from the topics and terms a household engages with
- Interest and intent segments for shoppers already in the market for a vehicle
- Third-party data from Experian, including automotive ownership and shopping signals
- First-party lists uploaded straight from your CRM, for conquest or service reactivation
- Retargeting, which serves your spot to households that already visited your site
- Lookalikes, which find new households that behave like your best visitors
That retargeting line is the one dealers underestimate. Someone browses your inventory on a laptop at lunch, and your commercial plays on their living room TV that night. Same logic your paid social already runs on, except it lands on the biggest screen in the house.
A note on demographics. Age, gender, and household income can all be targeted directly. Dealers United usually doesn’t apply them at launch, because narrowing the pool too early starves the campaign of the data it needs to find real buyers. Those levers come out later, during optimization, once delivery data shows where the sales are landing.
And that data is often surprising. On one recent campaign, the feeder markets outside the home city drove the majority of attributed sales while converting at more than twice their share of delivery. The home market, already saturated by other channels, under-converted. Tight geography feels efficient on a spreadsheet. It isn’t always what moves metal.
See what Streaming TV looks like for your store. Dealers United builds Streaming TV campaigns for franchise dealers across the country, with the targeting, the creative, and the sales reporting handled in one place.
Where Broadcast Still Beats Streaming
Streaming gets the attention. Broadcast still does one job nothing else does as well, and any partner who only sells you streaming is telling you half the story.
One buy, the entire market, immediately. Streaming builds reach household by household. Broadcast covers a whole DMA at once. When you’re launching a tent-pole sale, defending share against a new competitor, or introducing a new rooftop, nothing gets your name in front of an entire market faster.
It’s the cheapest reach on the plan. Local broadcast placements can run as low as roughly $5 CPM. That’s about a penny a person, against a streaming CPM closer to $30. You’re paying far less per impression in exchange for far less precision, which is exactly the right trade at the top of the funnel.
And it still reaches car buyers. 83% of car buyers are reached by television, and 61% of buyers over 50 named TV as their number one influence on the decision. [6]
The dealers who get the most out of TV don’t choose between them. Broadcast makes the market aware of the store. Streaming finds the households already shopping and follows them. Run them together and the second one costs less, because the market already knows who you are.
The Dealers United TV team buys both, every month, for franchise dealers. That combination is rarer than it should be. Most streaming vendors have never bought a broadcast schedule, and most station reps can’t report on a website visit.
How to Measure Streaming TV and Broadcast
Ask a station rep to prove a TV buy worked and you’ll usually get ratings and impressions. Neither one is a car. Here’s what actually gets reported.
On streaming, four numbers matter:
- Impressions and CPM, the commercials aired and what each thousand cost
- Website visits and cost per visit, the households that came to your site after seeing the spot
- Household reach and frequency, how many homes you touched and how often
- Attributed sales, matched back through footfall data to the households that saw the ad
Just as telling is what Dealers United leaves off the report. No clicks or cost per click, because a viewer has to be watching on a clickable device for those to exist, and most aren’t. Reporting them would inflate the campaign while describing a fraction of it. No completed view rate either, because streaming spots are unskippable and it’s always close to 100%. A metric that’s always perfect isn’t a metric.
Here’s what good looks like. These are the planning benchmarks Dealers United builds automotive Streaming TV campaigns against:
| Metric | Automotive benchmark |
| Cost per website visit | $10 to $35 |
| Cost per lead (form fill) | $100 to $300 |
| Cost per sale (offline, matched back) | $500 to $2,500 |
| Household visit rate | 0.25% to 0.75% |
If a vendor can’t tell you where their campaigns land against numbers like these, that’s your answer.
On broadcast, you read the traffic. Chart your spot log against daily site sessions and the pattern shows up fast: the days you’re heaviest on air are the days direct and organic traffic spikes. Branded search climbs roughly 20% within hours of a spot airing, and in campaigns coordinated across channels that lift reaches as high as 60%. [7]
None of this is automatic. It takes a pixel placed correctly, a footfall matchback set up before the spot airs, and someone reading the report who knows what a healthy frequency looks like.
Why Loading the Top Makes the Bottom Cheaper
Most dealers put 80 to 90% of their budget at the bottom of the funnel: inventory ads, paid search, and retargeting. All of it is aimed at shoppers who already know they want a car and already know your name.
That’s the digital equivalent of the Yellow Pages. You’re paying to win customers you’d mostly won already, and competing on price for every one of them.
Here’s what changes when the top of the funnel is loaded. Households that already recognize your store convert more cheaply everywhere else you’re spending. Paid search converts 22% better. Paid social improves 9%. Email improves 19%. [4] The same budget, in the same accounts, working harder because the market walked in already knowing who you are.
What it looks like in a real campaign. One dealer ran $4,871 in Streaming TV media over a month. That bought 158,611 impressions at a $30 CPM and delivered 12 attributed sales at $405.96 each, with frequency holding at 3.07.
Cost per sale under $500 puts that campaign at the efficient end of the benchmark range. Frequency near three says the budget went to reaching more homes rather than hammering the same ones.
And the buyers skewed wealthy. Households earning $100,000 or more produced roughly 46% of attributed sales while making up only about 16% of delivery, close to a 3x over-index. Households above $250,000 added another 18% of conversions on 2% of delivery. All told, about two-thirds of attributed sales came from households at $100K or above.
That tracks with where the new car market has gone. Families earning $150,000 or more now buy 43% of new cars sold in the country, up from a third before the pandemic. [8] The buyers with money to spend and credit to finance are watching TV, and Streaming TV is how you get in front of them without paying for the whole market.
Building Your First Buy, by Dealer Type
Single-Rooftop Franchise Store
Start with streaming, not broadcast. You can enter at a budget that would barely register on a broadcast schedule, and target the ZIPs that actually feed your store instead of paying for a whole DMA. Run in-market and Experian automotive audiences, layer site retargeting once the pixel has data, and hold the scheduled spots long enough to matchback a full sales month. Judge it on cost per sale, not clicks.
Multi-Rooftop Group
This is where running both pays off. One broadcast schedule covers the market for every rooftop you own, which no single store could justify alone. Then streaming splits by store and by ZIP, so the Honda rooftop and the Ford rooftop each get their own audiences and their own creative. Report by rooftop, and expect feeder markets to behave differently from the home city.
Legacy Store Defending Share
If a competitor just opened or a group bought a store down the road, broadcast is the fastest way to remind an entire market you’re still the name they know. Add streaming underneath it to catch the households actively shopping. Watch branded search in the first two weeks: it’s the earliest signal the buy is landing.
Streaming TV Advertising FAQ
Is Streaming TV the same as CTV or OTT?
Close, and in practice you’re buying the same thing. CTV means an internet-connected television set. OTT is the broader umbrella that includes connected TVs plus phones, tablets, and computers. Dealers United uses Streaming TV because that’s what it is to the person watching.
What’s the smallest budget where Streaming TV makes sense?
Smaller than most dealers assume, because you’re buying a defined audience rather than a market. The real floor is whatever spend gets you enough impressions to matchback sales in a month. Working backward from a $500 to $2,500 cost per sale gives you a realistic starting number for your store.
How fast will I see Streaming TV impact my website traffic?
Branded search often moves within hours of an ad airing. Attributed sales need a full matchback cycle, so give any first campaign a complete sales month before you judge it.
Can streaming TV target buyers near my dealership?
Yes, down to a list of ZIP codes, a city, a county, or the full DMA. Radius targeting is available with extra setup, though ZIP lists usually perform better because they follow real shopping patterns instead of a circle on a map.
How is a streaming ad different from a regular TV commercial?
The creative is often identical. What changes is who sees it and what you learn. A broadcast spot reaches everyone watching that program. A streaming spot reaches the households you selected, and reports back on visits, reach, frequency, and sales.
How do you prove Streaming TV sold a car?
Through footfall matchback. Households that saw the ad are matched against store visits and sold records, which produces an attributed sale count and a cost per sale. It’s not a click, and it shouldn’t be. Cars get sold in the store.
The Bottom Line
TV isn’t the line item you cut when budget gets tight. It’s the one that makes everything else you already pay for work harder.
Broadcast puts your name in front of an entire market at about a penny a person. Streaming finds the households already shopping and proves what they did next. Run them together and your paid search, paid social, and email all convert better, because the market already knows who you are before they start looking.
If you want to see what broadcast and Streaming TV would look like for your store, book a call with Dealers United. We’ll build a plan around your market, your inventory, and your busiest days. You can also see how dealers are performing across channels in our case study library.
Sources
- Nielsen, Streaming Embarks on Annual Summer Ascent in Nielsen’s May 2026 Gauge Reports, July 28, 2026
- Nielsen, Streaming Reaches Historic TV Milestone, Eclipses Combined Broadcast and Cable Viewing For First Time, The Gauge, June 17, 2025
- George Winslow, Streaming Subscriptions Reach 91% of U.S. Internet Households, TV Technology, November 2025 (Parks Associates data)
- MNTN Research, Connected TV Creates a Halo Effect for Paid Search and Social
- AdWave, Average Daily TV Viewing Time
- Newsblues, Broadcast TV Most Influential for Car Buying Decisions, January 2025
- Search Engine Land, Breakthrough TV Ads Trigger Search Spikes and Conversions
- Kelley Blue Book, Wealthier Households Are Driving Car Sales, January 2026
Written By Lauren Blackwell
Lauren Blackwell is a skilled content marketer who has spent the past 6 years working in automotive advertising technology and now brings her unique experiences to Dealers United. From running ad campaigns, to curating auto-specific resources, Lauren is empowered to create valuable content to help automotive dealers thrive on social media.
