The Buffalo TV Market Has Changed
Buffalo is a medium-sized TV market, ranked around 50th in the country by size. That means broadcast and cable advertising here is expensive relative to the audience you reach. A 30-second spot during local news on a major Buffalo station can run $200 to $800 depending on the program and time of day. A cable package across local cable zones runs more.
At the same time, the audience watching traditional TV in Erie County has shrunk every year since 2015. Cord-cutting is real here, particularly among adults under 55. The viewers who remain skew older and watch live sports and local news.
OTT / CTV advertising, or Over-The-Top advertising, is the alternative. OTT ads appear on streaming platforms: Hulu, Peacock, Tubi, Pluto TV, and connected TV devices like Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Apple TV. These are the platforms where the cord-cutters went.
How OTT Targeting Works
Traditional TV targeting is contextual. You buy a spot during a program and hope the audience matches your customer profile. You're paying for everyone who watches, including people who will never buy from you.
OTT targeting is behavioral and demographic. You can define your audience by:
- Geography (zip codes, cities, counties, radius from an address)
- Demographics (age, gender, household income, education level)
- Interests and purchase behaviors (in-market for a car, homeowner, recently moved)
- Device type (smart TV, tablet, desktop, mobile)
- Time of day and day of week
A HVAC company in Tonawanda can run OTT ads that only reach homeowners in Erie County between the ages of 35 and 65 with household incomes above $60,000. No one outside that profile sees the ad. That precision is impossible with traditional TV.
The Cost Comparison
OTT advertising is priced on a CPM basis, typically $18 to $40 per thousand impressions for local campaigns. That sounds expensive compared to digital display, and it is. But compared to traditional TV, the comparison is different.
A traditional TV spot at $500 reaches the full program audience, which might be 50,000 viewers. That's a $10 CPM on gross audience, but your actual target may be 20 percent of that, making the effective CPM $50. OTT at $30 CPM reaches only your target audience, making it more cost-effective in most local business scenarios.
The minimum buy for a meaningful OTT campaign in the Buffalo market is typically $1,500 to $3,000 per month for 4 to 6 weeks. Below that, you don't generate enough frequency for the campaign to register with viewers.
Unskippable vs. Skippable
One of the practical differences between OTT and traditional TV: OTT ads on most premium streaming platforms are unskippable. Hulu's standard ad-supported tier, for example, requires viewers to watch your 15 or 30 second ad before their show continues. YouTube, by contrast, is skippable after 5 seconds and serves a different purpose.
Unskippable OTT ads generate higher brand recall than skippable digital video. Studies from Nielsen and Kantar consistently show 30 to 40 percent better message retention from unskippable formats. For local businesses building awareness, that retention matters.
When to Use OTT, When to Use Traditional TV
Traditional TV still makes sense for a specific scenario: you want to reach a broad, older audience across the Buffalo market, you're running a campaign tied to live events (Bills games, Sabres games, local news adjacency), and your brand is large enough to absorb the cost of reaching many non-buyers.
Law firms, car dealerships, and regional retailers with mass-market products sometimes fit this description. For most small and mid-size Buffalo businesses, they don't.
OTT makes sense when you need geographic precision (specific zip codes or towns), when your buyer skews under 60, when your offer needs to reach people in a specific demographic or interest segment, or when you want to layer TV-style awareness on top of an existing digital campaign.
The Right Combination for Most Buffalo Businesses
The most effective media mix for local businesses in Western New York that we run today combines OTT for upper-funnel awareness with Google Search Ads for lower-funnel intent capture. OTT builds familiarity. When someone who saw your OTT ad later searches for your category on Google, your search ad is significantly more likely to get clicked. The awareness creates the search.
We measure this through branded search lift: the increase in direct searches for your business name during and after an OTT campaign. It's not perfect attribution, but it's a real and measurable signal that the combination is working.
If budget forces a choice between OTT and traditional TV for a local business under $5 million in revenue, we recommend OTT every time. The targeting precision, the cost efficiency against true audience, and the measurability all favor it.
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