Advertising for Tolland County businesses.

Tolland County is one of the seven Connecticut counties inside Nielsen's Hartford–New Haven television market, the 32nd-largest in the United States at 1,060,910 TV households (2024–25 Local Television Market Universe Estimates). For a UConn-adjacent business that matters twice over: the same market covers both the Storrs campus area and the Hartford-area households that the student and parent audiences travel in from.

That dual coverage is unusual and worth using deliberately. A Mansfield restaurant or an off-campus rental operator is selling to people who are physically in Tolland County for part of the year and somewhere else in the Hartford market for the rest of it. One broadcast schedule reaches both states of that audience, and the timing can be built around the academic calendar rather than a flat annual spend.

For the I-84 commuter towns — Vernon, Tolland, Ellington — the buy looks more conventional. Those businesses sell to households moving along the corridor, and broadcast on the Connecticut stations (NBC Connecticut WVIT 30, FOX 61 WTIC, WTNH 8 and WFSB) plus radio reaches them during exactly the part of the day they are in the car. OTT streaming on Roku, Hulu and ESPN adds ZIP-level targeting for the towns you actually serve.

Most small businesses in a rural county cannot justify a solo-buy broadcast budget, which is what the Ad Share Program is for: non-competing Connecticut businesses pool into shared inventory, splitting the cost while each keeps its own spots in the rotation. The commercial is produced at our Southington green-screen studio, 35 to 50 minutes away, by a founder with 25 years in Connecticut broadcast — one team producing, buying and reporting.

The out-of-state parent audience is the gap broadcast cannot close. A family in New Jersey or Massachusetts researching Storrs is not watching Connecticut television, and no amount of local schedule reaches them. That side is covered with ZIP-targeted OTT and social aimed at the towns those families actually live in, timed to the admissions and move-in cycles rather than run flat — which is a different plan from the one that serves the campus itself.