Advertising for Litchfield County businesses.

Litchfield County's advertising problem is that its customers live in two different television markets. The county itself is the northwest corner of the Hartford–New Haven DMA, which Nielsen ranks 32nd in the United States at 1,060,910 TV households (2024–25 Local Television Market Universe Estimates). But a large share of the weekend economy — the inn bookings, the wedding enquiries, the antique buyers — originates in New York, which is a separate market entirely and the largest in the country.

So a Connecticut broadcast buy does half the job well. It reaches the Hartford and Waterbury households who drive up for a weekend, on the same stations everyone else in the state buys — NBC Connecticut (WVIT 30), FOX 61 (WTIC), WTNH 8 and WFSB — and through the Ad Share Program it does so at a fraction of solo-buy pricing, by pooling non-competing Connecticut businesses into shared inventory.

The New York half needs a different instrument. OTT streaming on Roku, Hulu, ESPN, Pluto and Tubi targets by ZIP code rather than by market, which means a Kent inn or a Washington wedding venue can put a commercial on a television screen in Westchester or the Upper West Side without buying the New York market. Social advertising geo-targets the same way. For a county whose customers are defined by where they drive from, that control is the whole game.

The commercial is produced at our Southington green-screen studio, 45 to 75 minutes from most Litchfield towns, or on location at the property — which for hospitality is usually the right answer, because the building is what you are selling. Rich Conway has 25 years in Connecticut broadcast, so the same team writes it, shoots it, buys the media and reports on it.

The calendar matters as much as the split. Weekend and wedding decisions are made well ahead — a couple books a venue seasons in advance, a family plans a leaf-season weekend in late summer — so a schedule that runs during peak is advertising to people who have already chosen. We normally front-load spend into the planning window rather than the visiting one, and weight the New York side harder in the run-up to the seasons that actually draw out-of-state traffic.