Nine named audiences, zero health data
How SARAH turned a $32,000 state budget into a compliant, county-precise CTV buy for a state health agency, and a repeatable model for every mission-driven advertiser behind it.
Objective
A brief that would sink most CTV buys
The state's behavioral health agency needed to reach the professional workforce that sits between the state's criminal legal system and its substance use treatment system (correctional officers, judges, attorneys, clinicians, state administrators, peer recovery specialists) at every point someone with a substance use disorder passes through the system. Three things about that brief would sink most CTV buys.
The Approach
What SARAH did
Five decisions, made before the money moved, that turned a hard brief into a clean buy.
Read the audience as occupations, not conditions
Every name on the agency's list (correctional officer, judge, attorney, registered nurse, state employee) is a job, sourced from licensure files, employment records, and firmographic data. None of it touches a protected health inference. SARAH resolved all nine named audiences into four occupational clusters, so the campaign runs at full precision without a single restricted segment anywhere in the stack.
Bought the state, not the media market
The state's media markets cross into neighboring states, and a standard market-level buy would spend a real share of the budget outside the state's jurisdiction entirely. SARAH bought down to the postal codes that are actually inside the state, with an emphasis weighting toward the jurisdictions carrying the heaviest court, corrections, and treatment volume, verified county by county rather than assumed from the market boundary.
Excluded the genres that would undercut the message
True Crime and Mystery content ran ordinarily as a volume opportunity on this supply, which didn't fit an agency telling a story about diverting people toward treatment. SARAH excluded both at the trafficking level and weighted News up instead, both for its local broadcast reach and because local news is the most credible adjacency available for a state agency speaking to public employees.
Cleared for buy: News, Drama, Entertainment, Reality, and five more
Excluded: True Crime, Mystery (message-adjacency risk)
Structured the Spanish line around where Spanish speakers are
The state's Spanish-speaking population concentrates heavily in one part of the state, so the statewide Spanish line will skew there regardless of how it's bought. SARAH let that happen, then used the emphasis tier to guarantee Spanish presence in the other markets too, rather than letting the language line collapse into a single place by default.
Beyond This Campaign
The prospecting angle
This campaign is one placement inside a much larger, repeatable model. The supply partner's donated CTV footprint spans 227.8 million monthly ad requests, 13.76 million measured devices, and 210 markets, with a Hispanic American and African American composition measured directly on the panel rather than modeled.
The Takeaways
What this means for the next campaign
01
Occupational data can carry a health-adjacent campaign the whole way without ever touching a health-condition segment.
02
A media market is not a state. Buy the boundary that's actually being paid for, verified jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
03
Size the buy to measured supply before the money moves, rather than after underdelivery shows up in a report.
04
Brand suitability is a targeting decision made at trafficking, not a caveat added after the fact.
05
The same architecture that built this campaign prices the next one, for any cause vertical, in four steps.
