Commentary

TV Spots On Pro Sports For Everyone? Local Marketing Services Discover CTV

  • by , Featured Contributor, January 30, 2025

Last week, I wrote about why I am so bullish on independent agencies driving significant growth for our industry in 2025 and beyond. Today, in a related piece, I want to focus on the phenomena over the past decade or so of many local newspaper, radio and TV companies morphing from channel-focused ad sellers to omnichannel local marketing services companies.

It was a natural transition. Frist, the digitization of media and growth of tech platforms like Google Search, Facebook, Instagram and others not only siphoned off an enormous portion of the audiences from legacy, local channels, but took away their advertisers as well, using easy-to-buy, self-serve, outcome-focused offerings to capture the tens of billions that used to flow to daily classifieds, yellow pages, free weeklies, shoppers, newspaper display, TV ads, direct mail, circulars, posters, handbills, etc.

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Left with great relationships but less product in their bags, local media sellers and their companies started refashioning themselves as marketing services companies, re-aggregating audiences by packaging and reselling localized versions of others’ digital offerings. An early, high-profile example was the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, which in 2006 was “a consortium of seven newspaper chains representing 176 daily papers across the country [that formed] a broad partnership with Yahoo to share content, advertising and technology,” according to a New York Times article.

Local marketing service efforts have matured dramatically over the years and have become more nimble and entrepreneurial, reselling search, social, email and targeted banners. Since necessity is the mother of invention, many are driven and operated by talented former employees of the local media companies who were laid off as their former employers’ legacy media businesses shrank.

As they shifted from selling ads on a single local media channel to helping their clients exploit many different channels, they learned to follow what Intuit founder Scott Cook preached for years: “Fall in love with your customer’s problems, not your products.”

Thus, folks who built their careers selling radio or newspapers or yellow pages are now becoming experts in all of them, and in native digital marketing capabilities like search and social.

What comes next is pretty obvious: The “adult table” of television advertising is democratizing before our eyes, opened up to advertisers and agencies (and resellers) of all sizes with the explosion of connected TV advertising, AI-driven creative and easy-to-use, self-service automated targeting and buying platforms.

Thus, the tens of thousands of local marketing services companies -- all independent shops -- ranging from mom-and-pops, “just a gal” agencies or scaled mid-sized, full-service agencies. And they are all learning about leveraging the historically siloed world of sight, sound and motion on TV screens.

This means small businesses can buy spots on everything from NFL and MLB games without having minimums in the tens of thousands of dollars, get their TV-quality creatives made by AI for almost free, buy the ad with a credit card on a self-serve platform -- and become famous in their local markets, just like the big brands.

Will some of these marketing service companies and their advertisers even get their spots on the Super Bowl in just over a week? Of course they will.

We’re in a whole new world of TV advertising, and it will be driven by tens of thousands of independent local marketing service providers. Don’t miss it!

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