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. An adult child comparing four or five communities over several months will lean toward 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. 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, Fire 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.
How it differs from buying linear TV
Linear TV sells dayparts and programs across a whole broadcast market. You pay for everyone watching, including the households fifty miles from your community, and you commit well ahead of air date.
Streaming inventory is bought programmatically, by household. That changes three things:
- Geography. You can limit delivery to the radius your residents actually come from, instead of paying for a whole market.
- Flexibility. Budgets can be paused or shifted by month, which suits a community whose census need changes by quarter.
- Sequencing. Households that visited your website can be shown the spot again on their television, which is where the format earns its keep in a long decision.
If linear TV already works for you, streaming is a complement rather than a replacement. Whether traditional advertising still has a place is a separate question, and the answer depends on your market.
Why the format performs
Most streaming ads cannot be skipped, and they run inside content the viewer chose to watch. That is why completion rates on CTV are high compared with social video, where the thumb decides in a second.
Two cautions about that. Completion rate is reported by the platform, so ask how it is measured. And it is a delivery metric, not an outcome. A finished view proves the ad played on a screen; it does not prove anyone in the room cared.
Creative length matters less than it does on social. In a non-skippable slot, a 30-second spot is not abandoned the way it would be in a feed, so the choice between 15 and 30 seconds is a creative one: how much you need to say, not how much attention you can hold.
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. Measure it the way you measure search and 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 families are seeing you on their streaming services, more of them start searching your community by name.
- Conversion rate on your existing paid search. Familiarity makes the search ad work harder, and what a lead costs by care type is the baseline to compare against.
- Time from first inquiry to booked tour. A family who already recognizes you moves faster.
The tools for connecting a TV impression to a response are also better than they were:
- QR codes and short vanity URLs on screen, so a viewer with a phone in hand can act without searching.
- A dedicated tracked phone number in the spot, so calls from TV are counted separately.
- Household-level attribution, where the platform matches households that saw the ad to later visits to your site. This is modeled and vendor-reported, so treat it as directional.
- Geographic holdout tests, where you run in some ZIP codes and not others and compare inquiry volume. This is the most honest read, and the one we trust most.
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.
Targeting with care
Streaming platforms sell household audience data, and it is tempting to buy every segment that sounds relevant. Two cautions for senior living.
Health-related segments are sensitive. Audiences built on caregiving or medical searches raise privacy concerns, and several states now restrict how consumer health data can be used for advertising. Geography, household composition and your own site visitors are safer ground.
Housing advertising has fair housing obligations. Have any audience that includes or excludes people by age or family status reviewed before it runs.
The target is usually the adult child, not the prospective resident. They are the ones comparing options and, often, helping a parent through the residency agreement. Write the spot for them.
The condition under which it is worth it
Streaming needs frequency. If the budget only buys a household a couple of exposures a month in each market, it will not change anything and you are buying a rounding error. It is far better to concentrate the budget on one market than to spread it across four and be forgettable in all of them. Your media partner should be able to show you expected frequency per household before you commit.
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 the end 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.
It also suits some care types better than others. Independent living and CCRC decisions run for months or years, which gives familiarity time to work. Memory care is the exception: memory care converts in days while independent living takes months, so a memory care budget is usually better spent on search and fast response than on streaming.
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 often the whole decision.
An earlier version of this post included completion-rate, click-through and impression-share tables from 2021 streaming benchmark data. We removed them because the platform mix has changed a great deal since. The structural point, that CTV completes well and cannot be clicked, has not.
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