A Southwest dealer cohort spanning 11-20 dealers ran $300k-$400k in combined ad spend between April 4 and July 3, 2026 — a full 90-day quarter, not a promotional flare-up. The number that should stop a CFO mid-scroll isn't the spend. It's where 15% of that budget went, and what the blended cost-per-lead did anyway.
Fifteen cents of every media dollar in this cohort ran on
Within this cohort's blended media plan, Connected TV and streaming ran alongside search, social, and vehicle-listing channels as a meaningful line item rather than a token test — one piece of a coordinated cross-channel spend rather than an isolated experiment. The exact allocation split varied by rooftop and month based on inventory mix and local competition, and blended cost-per-lead across the full channel set stayed disciplined throughout the program.
— a channel most dealer groups still treat as a brand-awareness luxury they can't justify once a controller asks for a lead-cost number. The blended cost-per-lead across the full ten-sub-channel mix landed between $20 and $30, with a conversion rate in the 2-4% range across 11,579 tracked conversions. CTV didn't get carried by the rest of the plan. It ran inside a budget that still cleared a lead cost most dealers only see on their cheapest search terms.Why Do Dealers Treat CTV as a Cost Center Instead of a Lead Channel?
The instinct is understandable. CTV and streaming audio inventory is sold, priced, and reported the way linear TV always was: impressions, reach, frequency. A GM staring at a CTV line item next to a Google Search line item sees one channel with a cost-per-click and one with a cost-per-thousand, and assumes the second one doesn't belong in the same spreadsheet as a lead-generation conversation.
That assumption is a reporting artifact, not a fact about the channel. In this cohort, streaming and CTV carried a 15% share of total spend — the second-largest single allocation in the mix, behind only Google Search's 40% and ahead of Microsoft Search, Google PMax, and every individual Meta objective. That's not a token test buy. That's a deliberate, sustained allocation across a full quarter, measured against the same conversion definition as every other channel in the plan.
The dealer groups still keeping CTV in a separate "branding budget" bucket, reported on a separate cadence with a separate success metric, are the ones who can't answer the question this cohort answers by default: what did the fifteenth cent buy. Ask most GMs what their CTV spend cost them per lead last quarter and the honest answer is that nobody framed the question that way — the CTV vendor sent a reach-and-frequency deck, the search agency sent a cost-per-lead report, and the two documents never sat side by side.
What Does a Ten-Channel Media Plan Actually Look Like at $300k+ a Quarter?
The full channel split in this window: Google Search at 40%, Streaming/CTV at 15%, Microsoft Search at 10%, Google Performance Max at 10%, Meta Traffic at 10%, and Meta Lead Ads, Meta Awareness, Google Demand Gen, Meta Automotive Inventory Ads, and Meta Prospecting rounding out the remaining 15% in roughly even slices. Ten distinct sub-channels, one reporting period, one blended outcome.
Most dealer media plans don't look like this — not because ten channels is operationally impossible, but because ten channels reported by ten different account reps on ten different cadences produces a report nobody reads end to end. The agency model prices each channel as a separate retainer line; the incentive is to defend each channel's own number, not to ask whether the marginal dollar in Google Search would have converted a customer more cheaply on Microsoft, or whether the fifth percent of budget in Meta Prospecting is pulling its weight next to the fifteenth percent sitting in CTV.
This cohort's channel mix reads like a plan built by someone asking that question continuously, not once at onboarding. The split isn't round numbers because someone eyeballed a pie chart — Google Search at 40% is a majority-but-not-dominant share, five distinct Meta objectives sit at 5-10% each rather than one Meta line item, and CTV holds a share large enough to matter to the blended number, not a symbolic 2%. The same discipline applies to the new/used/CPO split most dealers set once and never revisit — a channel mix is only as good as how often somebody is willing to re-litigate it.
How Does a Blended CPL Stay Under $30 With a Fifth of the Budget in Awareness-Style Inventory?
The cohort's blended cost-per-lead sat in the $20-$30 range across the full 90-day window — a number that has to survive the drag of channels that aren't built to convert efficiently on their own. Meta Awareness objectives don't optimize for lead cost. CTV impressions don't carry a click-through the way a search ad does. Blend those into a plan alongside high-intent Google Search traffic and the naive expectation is a blended number pulled upward, not held down.
The average cost-per-click across the cohort sat in the $1-$1 range — tight enough that the search and PMax layers of the plan were doing real work, not just harvesting brand-name traffic at a premium. Across 16,128,000 impressions and 328,200 clicks, the plan converted at a rate that held the blended CPL in a band most dealers would call a Google-Search-only outcome — not a ten-channel blend that includes brand-building inventory.
That's the actual argument for running CTV inside the same budget engine as search and social, instead of carving it out as a separate spend decision made once a year at the upfronts: a channel doesn't have to convert on its own economics if the plan around it is disciplined enough to keep the blend where it needs to be. The click-heavy channels compensate for the impression-heavy ones inside a single reasoning pass — not because someone manually shifted a percentage point after reading two disconnected reports, but because the allocation was never split into two reports to begin with.
What Happens to a Media Plan When Nobody Owns the Whole Blend?
The default failure mode in dealer marketing isn't a bad channel. It's a good channel with no one accountable for how it interacts with the eight others sitting next to it in the same budget. A Google rep defends Google's number. A social buyer defends Meta's. A CTV vendor sends a reach-and-frequency deck once a quarter. Nobody in that room is incentivized to say "move two points of Meta Prospecting into CTV" or "Microsoft Search is outperforming PMax on cost-per-conversion, shift the split" — because nobody owns the shift, only the channel.
The agency-per-channel model was built for exactly one channel at a time, staffed and billed that way because that's how the industry has always sold service — not because that's how a car actually gets bought. A shopper who saw a CTV pre-roll in week one and converted off a Google Search ad in week three doesn't experience nine channels. They experience one dealer. The budget behind them should be reasoned about the same way, and the reporting behind it should reflect one outcome instead of nine invoices.
It's worth naming what this cohort's number is not. It is not a claim that CTV outperforms search — Google Search still carried the largest single share of spend in this plan, and nothing here argues that should change. It's a claim that a channel priced and reported on impression economics can sit inside a lead-generation budget without dragging the blended outcome somewhere a CFO would flag, provided the whole mix is being reasoned about as one decision rather than ten.
How AUTONOMi Drives These Results
This cohort's ten-sub-channel spend — Google Search, Google PMax, Google Demand Gen, Microsoft Search, Meta's full ODAX portfolio (Traffic, Lead Ads, Awareness, Automotive Inventory Ads, Prospecting), and CTV/Streaming — was allocated and rebalanced by AEGIS's single daily allocation pass, not by nine separate account managers checking in on their own cadence. AEGIS makes one reasoning decision across the full paid sub-channel set the dealer has enrolled, rather than optimizing each platform in isolation and hoping the sum adds up to a coherent plan.
The Connected TV and Streaming Layer sits in the same budget engine as Google Search and Meta — not a separate line item reported on a separate schedule. That's what let 15% of this cohort's spend run in CTV/streaming without the blended lead cost drifting: the allocation logic weighs every channel against the same conversion signal, every day, rather than treating CTV as an annual decision made once and left alone. A dealer who wants a channel run themselves instead can hand it back — any channel, including CTV, can be opted out in Budget Studio, at which point AEGIS stops touching it entirely and the freed budget redistributes across the channels it still manages.
Every sub-channel in this mix ran inside dealer-owned ad accounts — Google Ads, Meta Business Manager, Microsoft Advertising, and the CTV inventory partner — with AEGIS operating via delegated OAuth access the dealer can revoke at any time. Nothing about this allocation required a dealer to hand a vendor their accounts to get a plan that reasons across all ten channels at once.
Where This Goes Next
A 90-day, ten-channel, sub-$30-blended-CPL result isn't a ceiling — it's what one quarter of continuous cross-channel reasoning produces when CTV is treated as a lead channel instead of a branding tax. The dealer groups still running CTV on a separate budget, a separate report, and a separate accountability chain from search and social are leaving the same question unanswered every quarter: what did the fifteenth cent actually buy. If you want to see what your own group's channel mix would look like allocated this way, model your dealer-group's spend across all ten channels here.
Budget Studio gives the dealer a real steering wheel, not just a dashboard. A dealer can hand Google, Meta, Microsoft, or TikTok back to run themselves at any time — AEGIS stops touching that channel immediately, and the freed budget redistributes across the remaining AEGIS-managed channels. CTV sits outside that switch: because streaming inventory is bought as committed placements, AEGIS continues to manage the CTV allocation directly rather than releasing it to the dealer mid-flight, which is part of why the cohort's CTV spend stayed stable enough to hold the blended CPL under $30.
