Case Studies
What Actually Changed When Three Dealer Groups Switched Their Streaming TV Platform
"Better CTV" is easy to promise and hard to prove. Every vendor deck has a slide with an upward-trending line and no denominator.
So instead of a composite, here's what happened at three real dealer operations after they moved their streaming TV spend onto a feed-driven, managed platform — same budgets, same markets, same sales team, different platform underneath. Names are withheld; the group, brand, and channel are not.
Group 1: a Hyundai dealer running first-party data
This dealer added first-party data (1PD) targeting to its streaming TV campaigns — matching its own service and sales records against streaming audiences instead of buying against generic demo/geo segments.
Inside one month:
+49% vehicle sales, month over month
400 repair orders directly attributed to the campaign
$100K+ in service-visit revenue traced back to the same spend
The GM's own words: "It's like a money printer." That's a strong claim, and the reason it holds up is the attribution path — the dealer could trace specific repair orders and sales back to specific streaming impressions, not just a lift in a regional trend line.
Why it worked: 1PD targeting means the platform isn't guessing who's in-market from third-party cookies or panel data. It's serving ads against the dealer's own customer and prospect records — the people already in the sales cycle, or due for service.
Group 2: a Chevy group testing full-funnel vs. bottom-funnel
This group ran a direct internal comparison: full-funnel streaming TV (awareness through conversion) against a bottom-funnel-only version of the same budget.
The full-funnel version delivered 3X more attributed sales — 100 attributed sales vs. 38 for bottom-funnel-only — with 69% of all sales ad-assisted somewhere in the path.
This is the number that surprises marketing teams who've been told CTV is a brand-awareness channel and performance media is a separate budget line. The group's own read: "Better ROI than ever — it's crazy to say."
Why it worked: streaming TV that's wired into the same measurement stack as the rest of the funnel stops competing with performance media for budget and starts feeding it. Awareness impressions became identifiable, attributable inputs to the sales that closed weeks later — not a separate, unmeasured spend.
Group 3: a dealer that simplified its targeting
This is the case referenced most often in our own sales materials, because it's the cleanest apples-to-apples read: same dealer, same quarter, same total budget, only the platform and the targeting approach changed. The dealer moved from heavily layered third-party targeting to a simpler, inventory-and-feed-driven approach.
Inside one quarter:
+12% higher conversion rate
+31% more incremental reach, same total budget
−19% lower CPMs, plus an 8% lift in branded search
The dealer's read on why: "We stopped overthinking and just let it work."
Why it worked: heavily layered third-party targeting narrows the eligible audience and drives CPMs up as the platform competes for a shrinking pool of "perfectly matched" impressions. A feed-driven approach — bid into the inventory that's actually movable, let reach expand naturally — bought more attention for the same dollar and converted it better, because the creative matched what was actually on the lot.
The pattern across all three
Different dealers, different OEM franchises, different specific tactics — 1PD targeting, full-funnel measurement, and simplified targeting, respectively. But the same underlying shift shows up in every case:
The platform stopped guessing and started using data the dealer already had — first-party records, live inventory, funnel-wide attribution — instead of layering on more third-party targeting assumptions.
Measurement moved to the same-store, same-attribution-path level. None of these results are brand-lift studies. They're repair orders, attributed sales, and search lift — the numbers a GM already tracks every month.
Nobody added headcount or a new tech stack to get here. These are budget and targeting-approach changes on spend the dealers were already making.
What to check before you assume your CTV is performing
If you're running streaming TV today and haven't seen results like these, the gap usually isn't budget — it's one of these three:
Is your targeting layered so tightly that you're bidding against a shrinking, expensive pool of impressions? That's the pattern behind Group 3's CPM problem before the switch.
Is your streaming spend measured in the same system as the rest of your funnel, or off in its own "awareness" report nobody reconciles to sales? That's the gap Group 2 closed.
Are you using data you already have — service records, sales history, live inventory — or buying against generic third-party segments? That's what changed for Group 1.
None of these require new tools. They require a platform that treats your feed and your own customer data as the targeting source, not an add-on.
Want to see what a same-store read of your current CTV spend would look like? Send us last quarter's report — we'll show you the gaps, no contract required.
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