The pitch you have probably heard is that streaming is television, only cheaper. That is the wrong way to think about it, and it leads people to buy streaming the way they bought TV, which is how you end up paying a premium for something you could have had for less.
The screen is the same. The thing you are actually buying is not.
Broadcast sells you a program. Streaming sells you a household.
Traditional television priced access to an audience assembled by a show. You bought the ten o’clock news because a certain kind of person watched the ten o’clock news, and you accepted that plenty of them lived nowhere near you and would never be your customer.
Streaming inverts that. You are buying the household directly, and the program they happen to be watching is incidental. You can ask for households inside a fifteen-mile radius, with a homeowner, in a certain income band, and the ad follows them across whatever they choose to watch.
For a business that serves one town, that difference is the whole point. You stop paying for the eighty percent of a regional broadcast audience who will never drive to you.
You are not buying a time slot any more. You are buying a list of houses, and the show is just where you catch them.
What that changes about creative
Streaming inventory is almost entirely unskippable, which sounds like an advantage and is, until you remember it also means the viewer had no way out of a bad ad. Attention is captive but not friendly.
The spots that work are shorter than broadcast convention, front-load the point, and are legible with the sound off more often than you would like. A great deal of streaming is watched on tablets and phones with volume low. If your spot only works with audio, half its exposure does nothing.
What it does badly
Streaming is a poor first move. It is expensive relative to radio per person reached, and its strength is precision rather than volume. Precision is worth paying for when people already know your name and need reminding, and close to worthless when nobody has heard of you.
That is why we normally run it alongside radio rather than instead of it. Radio does the introducing at scale; streaming puts a face to the name for the specific households most likely to buy. Run on its own, streaming tends to produce a lot of impressions and a quiet phone.
The numbers to ask for
- Completion rate: what share of your ads played all the way through. Under ninety percent, ask where the inventory is coming from.
- Households reached, not impressions. Impressions count every screen in the house separately.
- Frequency per household per week. The same three-exposure logic that governs radio applies here.
- Where it ran. “Premium inventory” is not a placement. Ask for the actual list of apps and services.
That last one catches more bad buys than the other three combined. A meaningful amount of cheap streaming inventory is not what the buyer imagines it is, and the only way to know is to ask for the report and read it.
If streaming is on your list for next year, the useful question is not how much it costs. It is what has to be true before it is worth doing, and whether that is true in your market yet.
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