A Radius, Not a Country
Connected TV was sold to national brands first. The businesses with one location and a ten-mile trade area were left with the wrong tools.
A regional grocery chain with 40 stores does not have a national audience problem. It has 40 trade areas, each maybe six miles across, and a budget that cannot survive paying for impressions in states it does not operate in.
For most of CTV's growth, that advertiser was told to buy linear, or to buy a national CTV package and accept the waste. Neither answer is good. One is untargetable, the other is expensive in a way that shows up as a bad CPM on a good campaign.
Why local CTV stayed hard
Local digital used to run on device-level location. An advertiser bought a radius, a bid request arrived with GPS coordinates attached, and the match was made against an individual phone.
ATT took a large part of that apart, and the replacements have mostly been worse. Panel-based demographics do not resolve to a neighbourhood. IP-only targeting drifts. Modeled audiences give you a number that sounds local and a delivery report that is not.
Meanwhile the living-room screen has no device ID at all. There is no ADID on a smart TV in the sense a mobile buyer means it, so the entire question has to be answered somewhere other than the device.
The household is the local unit
A household has an address. That is the whole insight, and it is why the post-ATT answer to local targeting looks different from the pre-ATT one.
When contextual and behavioural signals resolve to a household rather than a device, geography comes along automatically, because a home does not move. No device IDs are required, which is what makes it work after ATT rather than in spite of it. And because the same household ID covers the TV and the phones in the house, a trade-area buy can run on both screens without being planned as two campaigns.
Practically, that means:
A real radius: Trade-area and radius targeting rather than a DMA-shaped approximation of one. All 210 US DMAs are available, but a DMA is often far larger than the business it is being used to describe.
Measurement that matches the ask: Store-visit measurement for physical locations. For an advertiser with one address, a visit is the outcome, not a proxy for it.
One frequency curve: The cap is set on the household, so the TV spot and the mobile reinforcement are not competing for the same living room.
Worth checking on your own plan
If you are buying local media and your targeting document still describes an audience by age and gender inside a metro, it is worth asking what that description resolves to at delivery. Often it resolves to the metro, and you are paying for the difference.
