• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, June 13, 2019

If so, that would show some incredible results -- especially since the entire over-the-air local TV advertising market is around $18 billion or so, depending on your favorite estimate.

That would be 33% of all local TV advertising through “30 leading agencies in 210 markets, servicing 294 national advertisers.” If that’s the case, this would represent a big move to automated local TV advertising selling. There are a total of 1,800 U.S. commercial stations that take advertising.

Why is stuff moving so fast? It seems that big media agencies, many of whom have signed on to Hudson MX, have had enough.

For at least two decades, they have complained about the inefficiency of local TV planning and buying systems when it comes to their major national brand clients. They want the business to move quickly into the digital media age, already filled with many automated and efficient options.

The key is that Hudson MX software looks to automate current media-agency buying and TV station selling platforms. A buyer can install a plan within a day or two, something that would usually take much longer.

To help this along, Hudson MX, a buy-side platform, has made a deal with the sell-side platform WideOrbit for faster transactions. The deal is non-exclusive, and Hudson MX can make other sell-side platform deals.

That said, many other local TV programmatic players might say their buying software/interfaces are also adaptable to media agency and TV media systems. But Hudson MX seems -- at the moment -- to have the upper hand.

So much so that two big media-buying groups -- IPG Mediabrands’ UM and Initiative units and Dentsu Aegis Network’s Amplifi -- are making a not-so-gentle push for TV stations to comply. In a letter to TV station groups, they say: “We respectively request that you work with Hudson MX.”

What does that mean? Perhaps there’s money to be had. So changes need to be made -- from all parties.

From TV stations' point of view, they have been taking -- in theory -- a longer approach, betting on the new TV standard, ATSC 3.0, which looks to promise many technological advances to compete with growing digital media competitors -- including perhaps automated and/or data-driven advertising monetization.

But rolling out ATSC 3.0 is slow-moving, with no industry-wide plan as to what it would mean for automating local TV station media buys.

Major media agencies are saying, ready or not, now is the time to play -- and big advertisers are ready to go all in.