Connected TV Ads for Nonprofits: An Arts Marketer's Guide
Yes, nonprofits can run connected TV (CTV) ads, and the barrier that once kept them out, huge media budgets, is lower than it has ever been. For a theater, museum or concert venue, CTV puts a video trailer on the biggest screen in the house, aimed at households near your venue, with reporting you can tie back to ticket sales. This guide covers how access works, what to buy, what the IRS cares about, and how to measure it without grading your own homework.
TL;DR
CTV is digital TV: you buy video ads delivered over the internet to streaming apps and smart TVs, with targeting by location, interest and audience list instead of a fixed time slot.
Nonprofits now have more entry points, including donated and discounted premium inventory, so a small marketing budget can still get broadcast-quality placement.
Keep all advertising non-partisan. 501©(3) organizations are prohibited from political campaign intervention, and CTV disclosure rules are looser than broadcast, so platform policies matter.
Measure against ticket sales, not just impressions. Connect your ticketing data to the campaign from day one.
Table of Contents
Why CTV is worth a look for arts organizations
Audiences have moved. Nielsen reports that streaming made up 43.8% of total U.S. television time as of March 2025, a 10-point rise in two years. The same report projects U.S. advertisers spending $33.35 billion on CTV in 2025, with the audience growing to 255 million by 2029.
For arts marketers, that matters for a simple reason. A season trailer, a single-night engagement or a special exhibition is a visual product. A static banner or a text ad can point to it, but a 15 or 30 second video can make someone feel what the evening is like. CTV is the channel where that video plays on a full screen, in a lean-back moment, with sound on.
There is also an honest reason to be cautious. CTV is a reach and consideration channel first. It rarely closes a sale on its own, and it works best alongside search, social and email that catch the interest it creates. Plan it as one part of the funnel.
What CTV advertising means, in plain terms
Connected TV refers to any television that streams content over the internet: smart TVs, streaming sticks, game consoles and the apps that run on them. Ads inside those apps are CTV ads. Over-the-top (OTT) is a related term that describes the delivery method, video served over the internet rather than through cable or broadcast. If you want a deeper primer on the vocabulary, our guide to CTV and OTT advertising walks through it.
What changes for a nonprofit is the buying model. Instead of purchasing a slot on a local broadcast station, you buy impressions, usually programmatically, and decide:
Where: a radius around your venue, specific ZIP codes, or a designated market area.
Who: households matching interests, past attendees, lapsed subscribers, or lookalikes of your best patrons.
How often: a frequency cap so the same household does not see your trailer eleven times in a week.
When: flights timed to an on-sale date, a preview week or a closing weekend.
How nonprofits get access to premium CTV
There are three practical routes, and most arts groups end up using a mix.
1. Donated and nonprofit-dedicated inventory
In 2025, Samsung Ads and AdGood announced a partnership under which Samsung donates ad space from its free streaming service, Samsung TV Plus, to a nonprofit media exchange. eMarketer’s coverage describes it as giving charitable organizations access to premium streaming environments, with AI-based tools to help produce and manage ads. Programs like this are worth investigating, especially if your budget is tight. Two cautions: donated inventory can come with limits on targeting, timing and volume, and eligibility rules vary by program, so read the terms before you build a campaign around it.
2. Self-serve platforms
Some ad platforms let you launch CTV campaigns yourself. You pay for what you buy, you control the targeting, and you carry the workload: creative specs, audience setup, frequency control, brand-safety settings and reporting. This works for teams with a dedicated digital marketer. It is hard for a one-person department that also runs the season brochure.
3. A specialist agency or managed service
An agency that buys CTV for cultural organizations handles planning, buying, creative adaptation and reporting. This route makes sense when you have a defined sales goal, a meaningful budget, and no time to learn five platforms. It is also where cross-channel strategy comes in, because CTV, Meta, YouTube, Spotify and search all feed each other. Our solutions page lists the channels we run for arts and culture clients.
Route | Best for | Main tradeoff |
Donated or nonprofit-dedicated inventory | Small budgets, awareness goals | Possible limits on targeting and scale |
Self-serve platform | In-house digital talent | Your team owns setup and reporting |
Specialist agency | Ticket sales targets, multi-channel plans | Service fees on top of media |
What CTV costs, and how to think about budget
CTV is typically priced by CPM, the cost per thousand impressions. Rates vary by inventory, targeting depth and season, and the fourth quarter is usually more competitive because commercial advertisers crowd in. Rather than quote a number that will be stale in a month, I would point you to our breakdown of CTV ad costs and budgets, which shows how blended costs work out in practice.
A few budgeting principles hold regardless of the rate:
Fund enough frequency to matter. A trailer seen once is easy to forget. Aim for a handful of exposures per household over a flight, not a single pass across a huge area.
Keep the geography tight. A theater draws mostly from a drive-time radius. Paying to reach households three hours away rarely pays back in ticket sales.
Reserve budget for the surrounding channels. If CTV creates interest, search and social should be ready to catch it.
Tie spend to the on-sale calendar. Start a flight before tickets open and keep it running through the weeks when buying decisions are made.
If you want a ticket-sales-focused view of how these pieces fit, our guide to trackable ads for theater ticket sales lays out a 30 to 90 day approach.
Creative that works on the big screen
Getting the creative half of the equation right matters as much as buying well. A few guidelines for arts organizations:
Win the first three seconds. Open on the strongest image: a dancer mid-leap, an audience reaction, a painting filling the frame. Do not open on a logo.
Show the experience, not the organization. Viewers care what the night feels like. Save the institutional story for your site.
Make a clear ask. One action, one date. A URL or QR code on screen helps, since viewers on a couch may pull out a phone.
Build creative variants. Test a 15 second cut against a 30, or a review-led version against a visuals-only one. Creative diversity carries real weight in delivery and in fatigue.
Design for sound off and sound on. Captions and strong visuals protect you in either case.
Your production budget does not need to match a commercial brand’s. Performance footage, rehearsal clips and archival material often outperform polished but generic spots because they are specific to you.
Targeting for ticket sales
CTV’s strength is that it is digital. You can use first-party data, such as a ticket buyer list you have permission to use, to reach existing patrons and to build lookalike audiences. You can also layer in geography and interests like theater, classical music or family activities.
A simple structure that works for many venues:
Prospecting: households in your radius with arts-related interests, shown the season or show trailer.
Re-engagement: lapsed buyers and past attendees, shown a reason to return, such as a new production or a member preview.
Last-chance flights: a short burst in the final week before a single-night engagement or closing weekend.
Respect your privacy commitments. Use only data you are permitted to use and follow your ticketing provider’s and the ad platform’s terms.
Measurement: prove it sold tickets
Here is where many nonprofit campaigns stall. Impressions and completion rates are easy to report. Tickets sold are what your board asks about.
Nielsen notes that the line between linear TV and CTV is blurring, and that only 32% of global marketers measure media spend holistically. That gap makes it hard to justify the investment. The IAB’s standardized measurement guide for CTV is a useful reference for the signals required for valid measurement of impressions, reach, frequency and attention.
For an arts organization, a practical measurement stack looks like this:
Define the conversion. Tickets purchased, memberships started or donations made, tracked through your ticketing or donation system.
Connect ad data to ticketing. Without this link, you are guessing.
Compare against a baseline. Look at sales pace for comparable shows without CTV support, and use geographic holdouts where you can.
Use brand lift when awareness is the goal. A short survey study can show whether exposed households know your show better than unexposed ones. See our guide to brand lift studies for nonprofits.
Report across channels. CTV often assists conversions that get credited to search or email. Cross-channel attribution keeps CTV from looking weaker than it is.
Our Breakeven dashboard was built for this problem. It tracks ticket sales alongside campaign performance and works with any ticketing provider, so you can see where sales are landing against your break-even point while the campaign is still live.
Compliance: the IRS line and the disclosure gap
Nonprofits can advertise. The restriction that matters most for 501©(3) organizations is political. The IRS states that these organizations are absolutely prohibited from participating or intervening in any political campaign for or against a candidate for public office. The agency also addresses business activities with candidates, including how accepting paid political advertising is evaluated. For an arts group, the practical takeaway is to keep your own ads non-partisan and to confirm with your counsel before running any issue-oriented message or accepting sponsor ads.
There is a second, quieter point. A Congressional Research Service report on identifying political and issue ad sponsors in the digital age explains that a growing share of TV viewing happens on internet-delivered services not covered by the same FCC regulation as broadcasters. In practice, transparency around who paid for an ad on CTV depends more on platform policies than on federal sponsor-identification rules. That cuts both ways: it means your own sponsor-supported or advocacy-adjacent campaigns should include clear disclosure by choice, and it means you should check the brand-safety and placement controls of any CTV buy, so your trailer does not run beside content that clashes with your mission.
For questions about your tax-exempt status, talk to your organization’s attorney or a tax advisor who works with exempt organizations.
Our perspective: start with the sales goal, then pick the screen
We work with theaters, museums and concert venues, and the pattern repeats. Teams hear that CTV is the channel everyone is buying, and they ask how to get on it. We would flip the question: what sales goal do you need to hit, by what date, and which channels will reach the right households in time?
Sometimes the answer includes CTV, paired with Meta for retargeting, YouTube for trailer reach, Google Search for people who are already looking, and digital audio on Spotify for commuters. Sometimes a smaller campaign on one or two channels does the job. What does not work is buying CTV with no way to connect it to ticketing, because then you cannot tell your board or your executive director whether it earned its place.
Our approach is to set up measurement before the curtain-up date, build creative variants for testing, and report in one place across channels. If a channel is not pulling its weight, we say so and move the budget. That honesty is the point of a dashboard that is not Meta or Google grading its own homework.
— Trevor
A 90-day plan for your first CTV flight
Days 1 to 15: set the foundation. Pick one show or exhibition with a clear on-sale date. Confirm your ticketing data can be matched to ad activity. Gather video assets and cut a 15 and a 30 second version.
Days 16 to 30: build and launch. Define the radius, audiences and frequency cap. Launch CTV alongside a retargeting layer on Meta or YouTube and a search campaign on your show name and category terms.
Days 31 to 60: read early signals. Check completion rates, frequency and site visits from exposed households. Rotate the weaker creative variant out. Watch ticket sales pace against your baseline.
Days 61 to 90: push and review. Run a last-chance burst before closing. Then document what the campaign did for sales, which audiences converted and what you would change next season.
Your destination page matters in all of this. If viewers scan a QR code and land on a slow, confusing page, the best campaign fails at the last step. A well-built nonprofit web design gives ads a place to convert, and an email platform built for nonprofits helps you follow up with the people your ads bring in.
Work with Opti Arts
If you want CTV that is planned around ticket sales and measured against them, we can help. We run campaigns across CTV, Meta, Google, YouTube, Spotify and display for cultural organizations, with strategy built around your budget and goals. See the full list of solutions, or explore Breakeven if you mainly need real-time ticket sales tracking. For a practical companion read, our guide to streaming TV ads for arts groups goes further into planning.
FAQ
Can nonprofits run connected TV ads?
Yes. Nonprofits can buy CTV ads like any other advertiser, and some programs now offer donated or dedicated premium inventory for charitable organizations. The main legal limit for 501©(3) groups is that ads must not support or oppose a political candidate.
What does CTV advertising mean?
CTV advertising means video ads delivered to internet-connected TVs and streaming apps. Because delivery is digital, you can target by location, audience and interest, and cap how often a household sees the ad.
How do I know if CTV is selling tickets?
Connect campaign data to your ticketing system and compare sales against a baseline, such as a similar show without CTV support. Add geographic holdouts or a brand lift study if you can. Credit CTV for assists, since it often influences purchases that close through search or email.
Is CTV only for large organizations?
No. Tight geographic targeting and frequency caps let a regional theater or museum run a focused flight. Lower-cost access routes also exist. Start with one show, a defined radius and a clear sales goal.
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