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I did. I should point out I work for an ISP, so my day job is managing proxy farms, DNS, and so on. It just didn't seem to stop ads on the Smart TV with any variation of whitelist/blacklist.

Even if you do that, there’s some devices (Chromecast, Google Home) that have Google’s DNS hardcoded and ignores the servers passed by DHCP.

This is terrible. What prevents them from doing the same to android phones and tablets?

What happens if you set your firewall to block 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4?

It bricks the device. See these previous discussions.

[1]: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dnsop/WCVv57IizUSjNb2R...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170671

You can use an iptables rule on your router to rewrite the address to your custom server, which I have done specifically because Google devices were ignoring DHCP.

Something like...

iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p udp --dport 53 -j DNAT --to x.x.x.x:53

...should work, and repeat for tcp

That still doesn't fix the ad situation. There's still stuff that goes on at the JS level that a browser ad blocker catches, but a DNS blocker won't. That's been my experience after installing Pihole on the home network.