Search finds the family at the moment they start looking. Then it loses them for the two to six months the decision actually takes.
That gap is the problem OTT and CTV solve, and it is the only reason a senior living community should consider them. Not reach, not brand awareness, not because streaming is growing. Because an adult child comparing four or five communities over several months will pick the one that stayed familiar, and search alone will not keep you there.
OTT and CTV are not the same thing
The terms get used interchangeably and they are not interchangeable.
OTT (over-the-top) is any video delivered over the internet rather than through cable or satellite, to any device: a phone, a laptop, a tablet, a television.
CTV (connected TV) is the subset delivered to an actual television set, either a smart TV or through a device like a Roku, Apple TV, or a games console.
The distinction matters when you buy. A CTV-only buy reaches people in the living room with the sound on. A broader OTT buy includes someone half-watching on a phone on the bus. Those are very different moments, and they should not cost the same.
Why the format performs
Streaming ads are largely unskippable, which produces completion rates no other digital format touches.
| Placement | Video completion | Click-through rate | Share of impressions |
|---|---|---|---|
| CTV | 96% | Not clickable | 49% |
| Tablet | 88% | 0.33% | 3% |
| Desktop | 81% | 0.27% | 16% |
| Mobile | 80% | Not reported | 27% |
| Creative length | Video completion | Click-through rate |
|---|---|---|
| 6 seconds | 78% | Not reported |
| 15 seconds | 88% | 0.21% |
| 30 seconds | 89% | 0.13% |
Two things stand out. CTV finishes 96% of what it starts and carries about half of all streaming impressions. And 30-second creative completes better than 15-second, which is counterintuitive until you remember these ads run inside content people chose to watch and cannot skip.
The 15-second spot earns twice the click-through rate of the 30. If you have one creative and a clickable placement, 15 seconds is the safer buy.
You cannot click a television
This is the part that trips up operators who are used to judging everything on last-click.
CTV has no click-through rate because there is nothing to click. If you measure it the way you measure search, it will look like it did nothing, and you will switch it off.
Judge it on the things it actually moves:
- Branded search volume. If people are seeing you on Hulu, they start searching your community by name.
- Conversion rate on your existing paid search. Familiarity makes the search ad work harder.
- Time from first inquiry to booked tour. A family who already recognises you moves faster.
If none of those shift within 90 days, the buy is not working. That is a legitimate reason to stop. “It got no clicks” is not.
The condition under which it is worth it
Below roughly $2,000 a month per market, frequency is too thin to change anything and you are buying a rounding error. It is far better to concentrate that budget on one market than to spread it across four and be forgettable in all of them.
Two more conditions worth being honest about:
You need a competent 15 or 30-second spot. Streaming is a high-attention format, which cuts both ways. A cheap slideshow with stock music will be watched to completion by people who now think slightly less of your community.
Search should be saturated first. If you are still leaving high-intent search impressions on the table, that money buys tours faster. OTT is what you add when search is maxed and the pipeline still has a gap in the middle.
Where it fits in the funnel
For most of the communities we work with, the sequence is: paid search to capture intent, programmatic and CTV to stay present through deliberation, and marketing automation to keep the family engaged between the first inquiry and the tour.
Take out the middle and the funnel still works. It just leaks for two months in a category where two months is the whole decision.
Completion rate and impression share figures are from streaming video benchmark data published at the time of writing (2021). Treat them as directional; platform mix has shifted since, though the structural point about completion versus clickability has not.