CTV Targeting: How to Reach the Right Households

If you’ve only bought broadcast TV, CTV targeting will feel like a different world. Instead of buying “Adults 25-54” and hoping the right people watch, you can identify specific households and serve them ads directly. That’s a fundamentally different way to spend your CTV advertising budget.

Beyond Age and Gender

The difference isn’t incremental. It’s fundamental.

How Household-Level Targeting Works

CTV’s core targeting mechanism works at the household level, typically through IP addresses and device graphs. This means you’re not buying time slots or programs. You’re buying access to specific households that match your criteria.

You can target households based on their composition, like the presence of children or the number of adults in the home. Income estimates come from location data and modeled information that data providers have compiled. Life stage signals help you reach households in specific situations: young singles, new families, empty nesters, or retirees. Home characteristics, from whether it’s a single-family house or apartment to estimated home value, all become part of your targeting toolkit.

For injury law firms, this means reaching households where someone might need a lawyer. You’re not broadcasting to everyone in a demographic bracket. You’re reaching people with characteristics that align with your actual clients. Our guide to CTV advertising for law firms covers how targeting fits into the full channel strategy.

Demographic Targeting Options

CTV platforms offer demographic targeting that builds on what you might know from other channels. Age ranges target estimated household member ages. Gender targeting focuses on household gender composition. Income targeting uses household income estimates, while education targeting reaches households with specific educational attainment. Ethnicity targeting is available when relevant to your campaigns, and presence of children targeting helps you reach families versus adults only.

These demographics are typically modeled or inferred from data partnerships rather than self-reported. Accuracy varies by data provider, but Nielsen and similar firms have built robust household-level models. The advantage over broadcast is that you’re applying these demographics at the household level, not the program level.

Behavioral and Interest Targeting

This is where CTV gets interesting. You can target based on what people do, not just who they are. Content consumption targeting reaches people who watch certain types of programming, from news and sports to lifestyle content. Online behavior targeting taps into website visits, search behavior, and app usage patterns. Purchase behavior targeting finds people who buy certain products or shop at specific retailers.

Interest categories help you reach auto enthusiasts, health-conscious households, sports fans, and other segments. In-market audiences identify people actively researching purchases like cars or homes.

For personal injury firms, behavioral targeting matters. Target households researching health conditions. Reach people with interest in legal content or life events. Look for households showing signals that suggest major life changes: new vehicle purchases, recent home moves, or changes in life circumstances.

Geographic Targeting at Every Level

CTV allows you to target geographically from broad to hyper-local. Country-level targeting restricts to US-only campaigns or goes international if needed. State targeting narrows to individual states. DMA (Designated Market Area) targeting follows the standard TV market geography. Metro and city targeting focuses on major metropolitan areas, while county targeting gets more precise, and zip code targeting provides the most granular option available.

For law firms, zip code targeting is valuable. You can focus on specific neighborhoods within your service area rather than buying the entire DMA. This reduces waste on households you can’t realistically serve and improves your cost efficiency. If you have multiple offices in different areas, you can run different campaigns to different regions with different messaging.

Bringing Your Own Data Into CTV

You can upload your own data to CTV campaigns and match it to household identifiers. CRM lists let you upload customer or prospect lists, match them to households, and target or suppress specific segments. Website visitors can be retargeted with your TV ads. Call lists let you target households that called but didn’t convert. Offline customer records match to streaming households, creating bridge between your offline business and digital TV.

Data onboarding typically happens through partners like LiveRamp, which match your records to the household identifiers used in CTV buying. This enables powerful strategies: excluding current clients from campaigns so you don’t waste impressions on people who’ve already hired you, retargeting website visitors with TV ads to reinforce your message, or reaching households similar to your best clients through lookalike modeling.

ACR Data: Retargeting Based on Viewing Behavior

ACR stands for Automatic Content Recognition, and it’s one of CTV’s most powerful targeting capabilities. Smart TVs from Samsung, LG, and Vizio can identify what content is displayed on screen, including linear TV feeds. This creates viewing behavior data that you can use for targeting.

ACR enables you to target people who watched specific shows, reach viewers of certain genres or networks, retarget households that saw competitor ads, and find viewers of relevant content like local news or sports programming. The retargeting use case is particularly valuable: if a household watched your competitor’s broadcast commercial, you can serve your CTV ad to that same household. They saw the competition, now they see you.

Building Your CTV Targeting Strategy

Here’s how to approach CTV targeting if you’re an injury law firm trying to build an effective campaign.

Be careful not to over-target. Narrowing your audience too much reduces scale, and CTV needs enough impressions to build frequency and recall. If your targeting is too precise, you may not reach enough households to move the needle for your firm. Work with your CTV partner to understand the audience size at each targeting layer.

What Changes About Your Budget

Household-level targeting means you’re not buying demographics and hoping for the best. You’re identifying specific households and reaching them with messages designed for them. For law firms, this transforms TV from a blunt instrument into a precision tool.

CTV targeting lets you focus budget on people who might actually need your services, in the areas you serve, with the characteristics that match your clients. That’s a fundamentally different proposition than broadcast’s “everyone in the DMA” approach. You’re investing in efficiency, not just reach.

References

1. IAB. "2025 Digital Video Advertising Spend Report." 2025.
2. Nielsen. "The Gauge: Streaming Share of TV Viewing." 2025.
3. MNTN Research. "Increased Investment in CTV Leads to Better Performance." 2023.