Franchise Advertising in 2026: How Connected TV Helps Local Brands Scale Nationally

Franchise advertising looks simple on paper: the franchisor sets the strategy and runs national-level campaigns, and franchisees support with localized efforts.

That worked fine a couple of decades ago, when national could build brand awareness with traditional TV advertising, and branches captured local demand with mailouts and coupons.

But that playbook doesn’t work in 2026.

Today’s buyers expect a consistent experience across all channels, meaning there’s more pressure than ever on franchisors to fix fragmented local execution.

Add to that the fact that the franchise’s go-to advertising channel (linear TV) is being steadily replaced by streaming, and one thing is clear:

Franchises need to rewrite the advertising playbook.

This guide breaks down why Connected TV (CTV) advertising should form the foundation of that strategy.

We’ll explore how franchisors can utilize CTV to convey a unified brand message. At the same time, franchisees deliver localized offers, with a level of targeting precision that is more naturally aligned with the two-tier franchise model.

Why Franchises Need a New Approach to Advertising in 2026

Franchise advertising, owing to the nature of franchises themselves, is a little more complicated than your typical ad program.

Typically, it's a two-layer system, where:

1. Franchisors manage national brand strategy, creative, and high-level media buys
   
   
2. Franchisees execute localized campaigns tailored to their specific markets

Each party plays a distinct role in promoting the brand, and marketing duties are clearly divided between the two.

Franchisors typically provide:

• Brand standards and creative templates
  
  
• Approved vendors and platforms
  
  
• National campaigns and measurement guidelines

Franchisees generally handle:

• Local offer messaging
  
  
• Local ad placements
  
  
• Community engagement

Naturally, this division creates some tension, which shows up in four key areas.

The Core Challenges Brought On by the Franchise Advertising Model

Fragmented Media Buying

In most cases, there is a national ad fund managed by the franchisor. Franchisees are asked to contribute a percentage of revenue to fund these national campaigns.

Each location is encouraged to invest in its own localized media, provided it conforms with national brand guidelines.

In some cases, brands work on a co-op model. In this model, national provides matching funds for approved local advertising, supporting franchisee reach.

This gives franchisees more autonomy over how they promote their branch, but makes it harder for franchisors to understand local performance due to channel fragmentation and a lack of centralized reporting.

In both cases, since each franchise location is responsible for its own local campaigns, they have little ability to access economies of scale. This results in increased total expenditure on advertising, a lower return on investment, and, in many cases, duplicated spend targeting the same audiences.

Inconsistent Creative

Franchisees may neglect to execute on local TV ad programs consistently, or differ in the channels they choose, meaning the brand shows up differently in different geographies.

For the franchisor, maintaining brand standards across locations is a core challenge; 34% of franchisors say getting franchisees to follow brand guidelines is one of their biggest marketing challenges

Creating and distributing documentation on brand guidelines is easy; enforcing those guidelines, not so much. Local variations tend to dilute national messaging and can damage brand consistency.

Limited Visibility into Performance

Since local campaigns are fragmented and owned at the regional level, the national doesn’t have a lot of visibility into what works across locations.

Only 38% of franchisors have complete visibility into their franchisees’ marketing and communications programs across all locations. This means that most brands are unable to compare results across marketers, understand which channels drive outcomes, or provide tailored support at the local level.

Traditional Channels Are Becoming Less Effective

For franchisors, traditional channels like linear TV have been the go-to for ad programs. But this is no longer where modern buyers consume content.

Streaming now surpasses linear as the default viewing environment. As of May 2025, Nielsen reported that streaming accounted for 44.8% of all U.S. TV viewership, exceeding the combined share of broadcast and cable for the first time.

Viewers expect personalized, locally relevant messaging even from national brands, and that’s hard to achieve with traditional channels and tools that only offer high-level reach metrics, making it impossible to tie spend to real customer outcomes.

Franchise Brands Need a Unified, Measurable Approach

To succeed in the current landscape, national and local campaigns must operate within a unified, coordinated strategy.

Advertisers need reliable channels that support both broad reach and precise local targeting, with consistent measurement across every location to prove ROI and support optimization.

Could connected TV (CTV) solve the core problems franchise advertisers are facing today?

How Connected TV Unifies National Scale and Local Relevance

TV advertising has traditionally been the franchisor’s domain, since it works well for reaching a broad audience at the national level (a great fit for brand awareness campaigns).

But its inability to target at the local level meant TV advertising never worked for the franchisee, as they couldn’t target audiences around specific franchise locations by ZIP code, DMA, or radius.

Centralized Media Purchasing

CTV introduces household-level geographic control that traditional TV never offered, enabling national and local franchise advertising to coexist inside one coordinated channel.

Instead of dozens or hundreds of disconnected local media buys, CTV allows franchises to operate inside a single, coordinated buying framework.

National maintains central governance, while franchisees activate geo-specific campaigns inside the same buying system. This consolidates fragmented media buying into a single, scalable structure, restoring economies of scale.

Both parties can geotarget only households in the franchisee’s service area, eliminating wasted spend advertising to non-buyers, and allowing franchisees to access economies of scale via national purchases.

Consistency Across Campaigns

With CTV, franchisors can provide a core set of approved ads, while franchisees layer in their own local offers on top. That means every location can promote what matters locally without drifting away from how the brand is intended to show up

For franchisors, maintaining consistency becomes more attainable, as ad programs become collaborative rather than siloed.

Unified Performance Reporting

CTV provides unified reporting, tracking both national impact and local actions, such as site visits or conversions.

Because all TV-level advertising now flows through a single delivery channel, franchisors gain complete cross-market performance visibility by default. National and local performance data live in one reporting environment rather than across disconnected channel dashboards.

This resolves the visibility gap that historically prevented brands from comparing markets and optimizing programs at scale.

How to Build a Franchise Advertising Playbook for 2026 

To make CTV work in a franchise environment, brands need a clear operating model that aligns national strategy with local execution.

Here’s how.

1. Set Clear National and Local Objectives

In an effective CTV-led franchise advertising program, national and local teams are not just aligned on end goals; each owns distinct layers of the same advertising funnel inside one shared channel.

The franchisor owns strategic duties and upper-funnel CTV activity, ensuring consistent exposure across markets.

Franchisees inherit that demand within the same CTV environment. Their role is to activate lower-funnel outcomes by running geo-specific campaigns that drive site visits, increase store traffic, enhance engagement, and ultimately lead to conversions within their service areas.

With this in mind, success metrics must be structured by funnel ownership:

• For franchisors working at the national level, metrics to track include reach, awareness, and brand lift
  
  
• For franchisees taking over at the local level, ad objectives typically include driving store visits, increasing offer engagement, and ultimately creating conversions

Because both layers operate inside one delivery and reporting system, national performance directly influences local performance.

When brand-level CTV reach underperforms, local CTV campaigns lose efficiency. When local offer activation improves, national CTV lift becomes more apparent.

2. Design Creative Guidelines and Localization Rules

Franchisors need to establish boundaries that allow franchisees room to experiment and test without compromising brand consistency at the national level.

They can do this by defining:

• Core brand messaging
  
  
• Visual standards
  
  
• Rules for presenting offers
  
  
• Call-to-action (CTA) structures that apply across every market

These master templates become the foundation for all franchise CTV advertising. Franchisees then localize within that framework by applying approved offer overlays, location references, and market-specific CTAs inside the same CTV delivery environment.

Because localization happens inside centrally governed creative templates, every ad remains on-brand by default, even when offers, pricing, or promotions vary by location.

It's also important to recognize that franchisees will want to test boundaries, try new creative angles, or experiment with new channels or promotional styles.

The best franchisors don’t discourage this, but instead provide an easy approval workflow to maintain consistency without limiting flexibility and creativity. That next big national ad idea may well be sparked at the local level.

Franchisees can trial new offer angles or messaging variations through controlled CTV creative versions that flow through a central approval and reporting workflow. High-performing local creative can then be promoted into national templates, allowing winning ideas to scale across the network.

Dynamic Creative Ads from Strategus are a great way to put this idea into practice. You can use them to showcase live inventory, promote weekly sales, and streamline multi-location campaigns. You simply input all the local data into the database, and the platform will automatically generate customized, location-specific ads.

3. Build Your Audience and Targeting Framework

At the national level, the franchisor should define the primary audiences the brand needs to reach at scale, based on customer demographics, interests, life stage, or household attributes that reflect the ideal customer profile.

These base audiences become the default targeting layer for all franchise CTV campaigns.

Franchisees then apply local geographic targeting around their individual locations, using ZIP codes, DMAs, or radius targeting to ensure ads only reach households within their service area.

The franchisor should also establish clear guidelines for utilizing behavioral and intent-based segments, specifying which audiences are approved and how they can be layered on top of geographic targeting. This keeps local campaigns focused on likely customers while maintaining consistency across markets.

4. Design Your Budget and Distribution Model

Successful franchise advertising requires clarity upfront on who funds which kinds of campaigns and how.

The franchisor should set clear guidelines on:

• How national ad fund dollars support brand-level campaigns
  
  
• What franchisees are expected to contribute to national, upper-funnel CTV campaigns
  
  
• Minimum viable spend levels that franchisees should be expected to invest in lower-funnel CTV activation
  
  
• When national funding covers a campaign, and when franchisees should add incremental spend

Because buying occurs through a coordinated national framework, franchisees benefit from aggregated purchasing power, reduced CPMs, and consistent delivery standards that individual locations cannot achieve on their own.

5. Implement Measurement and Reporting

In a CTV-led franchise advertising model, all TV-level performance flows into a single measurement system.

The success metrics established during the first step become the reporting structure for every market:

• National: reach, frequency, brand lift.
  
  
• Local: site visits, store traffic, conversions, incremental lift.

Since all measurement is delivered in the same reporting environment, franchisors gain full cross-market visibility by default. They can compare performance across markets, offers, and creative, without stitching together disconnected dashboards.

CTV advertising agencies like Strategus can set up franchises with unified reporting dashboards that allow cross-marketer comparison, with the ability to track and measure actions like:

• Website visits
  
  
• Lead submissions
  
  
• Foot traffic

The Future of Franchise Advertising Is Unified, Measurable, and CTV-Led 

Franchise advertising is shifting away from fragmented, hard-to-measure tactics toward scalable programs built on clear performance visibility.

Connected TV supports this shift by providing franchisors with national consistency while enabling franchisees to drive measurable local outcomes within the same framework. For brands planning for 2026, a CTV-led approach creates the structure needed to scale with confidence.

Strategus helps franchise brands put this into practice by managing CTV campaigns built for multi-location structures, with precise local targeting, centralized governance, and outcome-based attribution.

Reach out today to learn how Strategus can help.