You Don't Need a Super Bowl Budget to Advertise on TV

When most people picture TV advertising, they picture the big, broad campaigns: Budweiser’s Clydesdales pulling a wagon through the snow, the Chili’s “baby back ribs” jingle still stuck in your head decades later, a leprechaun promising your cereal is magically delicious, or a Ford truck commercial set to a hokey Nashville country song. The kind of product almost any household in the country might plausibly buy, with a campaign and budget built to match.

That was the old game. And if you’re running a growing business with a specific customer, a specific service area, or a relatively narrow market, your instinct has probably been that TV advertising simply doesn’t make sense for you. For a long time, that was a reasonable conclusion. The way television was bought made it difficult to justify the cost of reaching a mass audience when only a small portion of that audience could realistically become your customer.

Why TV used to be a terrible fit for most smaller businesses

The old model of television was built around mass reach. The big advertising agencies and networks weren’t asking, “Who are the 50,000 people most likely to buy from this business?” They were asking, “How many millions of people can we put this commercial in front of?” Broadcast television was built around the idea of everyone watching the same thing at the same time. Cable expanded the number of channels and gave advertisers some additional geographic and demographic options, but the basic model didn’t change much. You bought a time slot on a channel, and your commercial appeared on the televisions tuned to that channel at that moment.

That model could be incredibly powerful if you were selling something almost everyone might want. It was a much worse proposition if your actual customer was a small slice of the audience. Imagine you own a high-end furniture store. Your customer might be a homeowner within 20 miles, with a certain level of household income, who is currently furnishing or renovating a home. You don’t need to reach everyone watching television in your market. You need to reach the relatively small number of people who look like your customers.

Traditional television couldn’t make that distinction very well. You bought the audience that happened to be there, and you paid for all of it. A single thirty-second spot in a top primetime program could cost anywhere from the high five figures to well over a million dollars, according to Ad Age’s primetime advertising data. Even local television could require meaningful spending to generate enough reach to make a campaign worthwhile. So the math was pretty simple for a business like yours: why would I spend that kind of money to reach thousands of people who will never buy from me?

That’s why television became associated with national brands. It wasn’t because smaller businesses couldn’t benefit from television’s ability to build a brand. It was because the way television was bought made it economically irrational to reach a narrow audience.

Then television changed, twice

The first change was how people watched. It didn’t happen overnight. It started with the DVR, when TiVo let people record a show and watch it on their own schedule instead of watching live. Streaming took that idea much further: entire libraries of shows available whenever you wanted them, without planning your evening around a network’s timeslot. Cord-cutting followed, and the old distinction between “television” and “the internet” started to disappear.

Today, when someone says they’re watching TV, there’s a good chance they don’t mean broadcast or cable at all. In May 2025, for the first time on record, streaming accounted for more total TV viewing in America than broadcast and cable combined: 44.8% of all TV viewing versus 44.2% for broadcast and cable, according to Nielsen’s The Gauge. That trend has continued, and streaming isn’t just a younger person’s habit. Pew Research Center found that 83% of American adults now use a streaming service, while only 36% still subscribe to cable or satellite.

Streaming TV isn’t some niche corner of the media world anymore. It’s television. But the more important change for advertisers wasn’t simply where people were watching. It was what they could do with that audience.

With traditional television, you bought the show and got the audience that came with it. With streaming TV, you can increasingly start with the audience you actually want and then find the television programming where those people are watching. That’s a fundamentally different proposition. A streaming platform can show your ad to people in your specific sales area, within a particular age range, at a certain household income level, or with particular interests and behaviors. You can narrow the geography, define the audience, and build a campaign around the people who actually have a reason to buy what you sell.

You can also use the programming itself as another layer of relevance. If you’re a high-end appliance company, for example, a show like The Bear is an obvious environment to consider because its audience has a demonstrated interest in food, cooking, and restaurants. You’re not just buying television viewers. You’re reaching people in an environment that already makes sense for the product. Live sports, one of the last forms of television that still gathers enormous audiences at the same time, can be bought with much more precise geographic and audience targeting than the old national broadcast model allowed.

You can choose the audience first

Content adjacency is useful, but it’s only part of the story. The bigger shift is everything underneath it: geography, household characteristics, interests, shopping behavior, and other signals that help define the people you’re actually trying to reach.

That’s a huge change for a business with a narrow customer base. An art gallery doesn’t need everyone within driving distance. It needs people who actually collect art, have the means to buy it, and live close enough to visit the gallery. A luxury retailer doesn’t need every household watching television. It needs households that already demonstrate the income and purchasing behavior associated with the brands it sells. A med spa doesn’t need every adult in the city. It needs a much more specific audience with the right combination of age, geography, interests, and ability to pay.

A landscaping company might only want homeowners in three ZIP codes with properties above a certain value. A financial advisor might only want people approaching retirement within a particular geographic area. Those aren’t bad audiences for television. They’re actually some of the most interesting audiences for streaming TV because you can finally be selective about who gets the message.

The more specific your customer is, the more interesting this becomes. If your customer is “everyone,” you have plenty of ways to reach them. But if your customer is a very specific person in a very specific place, with a very specific reason to buy from you, traditional mass media has always been a difficult proposition. Streaming TV changes that equation.

The economics can be surprisingly accessible, too. If you’re already spending money on print, radio, paid social, or digital advertising, you may be much closer to being able to add streaming TV than you think. This isn’t priced like a national broadcast campaign. You’re not buying the entire market. You’re buying access to a defined audience within the market you actually serve.

You’re still getting what made TV powerful

There’s another part of this shift that I think gets overlooked. The reason companies like Volkswagen, Ford, and General Mills spent decades buying television wasn’t simply because television could deliver a lot of eyeballs. It was because television is exceptionally good at building emotional associations around a brand.

You’re sitting on your couch. You’re relaxed. You’re paying attention. There’s a story, a character, a piece of music, a feeling. A thirty-second commercial can do more than tell you that something exists. It can make you feel something about it. That’s how products become brands.

Streaming didn’t take that away. It changed how you get access to the audience. For a growing business, that’s the interesting part. You don’t have to choose between the precision of digital advertising and the brand-building power of television anymore. You can use modern audience targeting to make the economics work while still getting the storytelling and emotional impact that made television such a powerful medium in the first place.

And that is an important distinction. Streaming TV isn’t simply another place to put a digital ad. You’re getting access to a medium that people already associate with entertainment, storytelling, sports, culture, and some of the biggest brands in the world. The difference is that you no longer have to buy the entire audience to participate.

TV can be another layer of your marketing

Streaming TV isn’t a replacement for everything else you’re doing. Search is still valuable because it captures people who are actively looking for something. Social can create engagement and keep your brand in front of people. Email can deepen relationships with customers you already have. Digital advertising can drive immediate action. Television does something different: it gives you a way to introduce your brand to the right people before they’re actively looking for you, and to do it with the kind of storytelling and emotional impact that made television such a powerful brand-building medium in the first place.

That’s why the most interesting question for a growing business isn’t simply, “Can I afford to advertise on TV?” It’s whether television could help you become better known among the specific people you most want as customers.

For some businesses, the answer will be no. For others, it could be one of the most effective ways to build recognition and demand in a market where they’ve been relying almost entirely on performance advertising. The important thing is that television no longer has to be treated as a medium reserved for companies with national audiences and Super Bowl-sized budgets.

That’s part of why I started Future Days Media: to help growing businesses think about media the way the biggest brands have always thought about it, but with the tools and economics available to them now. If you’ve ever assumed television advertising was built for a completely different kind of business, it may be worth taking another look at what TV advertising actually looks like today.

Get in touch and let's talk about how streaming TV can help build your brand.

Matt is the founder and brand strategy director of Future Days Media.