Part One:

Think Global, Act Local: Why Local Advertising Is Having Its Moment

We’re deep into the election season, with national, state, and local candidates all vying for attention across both broadcast and streaming services. It’s hard to turn on a device without being bombarded by political advertising. And what you’re likely to notice when you pay attention to those ads is how targeted they are to you. Not just the ads for your local congressperson, but also the ads for national candidates. Are you reading this in Iowa? Then, says Ann Hailer, president of broadcast for Locality, a provider of local advertising services, chances are the ad you’re seeing is focused on farm subsidies. In Michigan? Then maybe the focus is on manufacturing. In Texas? Immigration. “Using those 30 seconds to make sure the ad is resonating to what matters to the community is really the point of political advertising,” says Hailer.

A key focus in political advertising, Hailer adds, is stressing the importance of getting out the vote, regardless of “political persuasion.” In this case, she says, both broadcast and streaming have shown they have critical strengths: “While broadcast and political advertising clearly work hand in hand, the data that’s behind each of these voter segments and the issues that matter to the voters has also allowed streaming to emerge as a critical part of political advertising.” The result, she says, “is that there is an almost emotional connection on the broadcast level,” which is then complemented by “those very personalized, very targeted messages that happen on the streaming side.”

But it’s not just political advertising that’s now infused with local flavor. Increasingly, says Hailer, the range of available data and the ability to leverage it across platforms have made it possible for all types of advertisers to “look at the granular details of viewer habits,” incorporating behavioral, contextual, and demographic insights to understand “what the local preferences are and what the consumer behavior patterns are.”

Advertising’s White Space

The localization of advertising, Hailer believes, illuminates several critical needs for both consumers and advertisers. Consumers “are looking for messaging to mean more to them,” she says, “and the advertiser knows that and is demanding that those messages get more ROI and lift for their spend.”

Key to this is understanding that, as Hailer puts it, “all purchases are, and have always been, local.” The difference today is that there is now “the opportunity to dig into consumer behavior, to look at the competitive landscape, and to target very specific audiences for potential advertisers.” The ability to localize ads, Hailer suggests, “is the true ‘white space’ in advertising right now.”

Filling that white space doesn’t just mean advertising in local markets, Hailer stresses. “It’s understanding that the messaging in Cincinnati is vastly different from the messaging in Seattle or the messaging in New York City.” As a result, “the execution of local advertising has to involve deploying ads across all the relevant broadcast and streaming services with continuous optimization, continuous measurement, continuous understanding of the competitive set in that marketplace. You’re constantly tailoring it.”

Achieving a Blend

This need to continuously tailor both ads and platforms is particularly true for sports advertising—especially in an era where streaming is becoming a more significant force. “This is absolutely requiring a masterful blend across broadcast and streaming to achieve eyeballs where they are,” says Hailer. “Sports has become so fragmented in terms of where and how people are consuming sporting events.”

It's also true for other services that are inherently local, such as local law firms, local retailers, or local arts centers.

In those cases, Hailer says, while “the potential customer base might be smaller, the methodology’s the same. You need to figure out: Why are you using broadcast? Why are you using streaming? What other mediums are available to you—such as newspapers, email, and search marketing? What are the outcomes you’re expecting from each of them? And what’s your competitive set?” As an example, she points out that while a store like Walmart might be found in every market, in Detroit, it’s competing with Meijer, and in the South, Kroger has expanded its consumer brands to compete with them.

The Consultative Approach

If it seems more complicated than it used to be, that’s because it is. Which is why, in working with its clients, Locality generally takes a consultative approach, helping brands understand—after leveraging data and analyzing the targeted DMAs—where the gaps are in their campaigns. Locality can then help fill these gaps by working with its clients to develop an optimized recommendation through which to achieve whatever KPIs the brand is looking to achieve.

Sometimes, this also means making adjustments to creative executions. Part of tailoring the plan, Hailer says, is “tailoring your message on the creative side.” Sometimes it’s just an ad tech solution that allows that brand to add some localized messaging, such as store location or incentives. Other times it’s a more comprehensive creative reimagining, a service Locality often provides to its clients through a product called VideoNow.

However, switching to a local mindset isn’t necessarily something that all parties involved in selling local advertising understand instinctively. To counter that, Locality runs seminars and even boot camps for both its internal sellers and the firm’s partners to, as Hailer describes it, “equip salespeople with a deep understanding of why local matters and all the local advertising strategies that are out there.” Hailer stresses that “we all have gaps. We all have things we need to learn and understand, and the beauty of our training is that we bring cross-discipline to that training so that you’re able to capture where your own personal gaps might be—especially in terms of understanding the cross-platform approach.”

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Part Two:

Layers & Leverage: How a strategic approach to local advertising expands a national campaign’s ROI

In describing why national advertisers should layer a local approach on their national efforts to expand both reach and impact, Steve DeMain, executive vice president of sales at Locality, a provider of local advertising services, points out that “every market looks different.” For example, he says, even if an advertiser is already “running ads across all 210 DMAs and buying both streaming and broadcast, the ad has more potential to make a larger impact in each market if the advertiser layers in local nuances.”

Some markets, he notes, “are underserved from a streaming or a broadcast perspective—or even both.” Leveraging new technologies such as automatic content recognition [ACR] data to measure the penetration in a specific market and working with a specialty provider of local ad services “can help brands learn which streaming services are being consumed and understand the broadcast footprint of the local market. This allows advertisers to layer the buys together and extend reach.

DeMain points to a recent national campaign where, by focusing on the brand messaging and tailoring that messaging to specific markets, the advertiser “layered the local ad buys together and saw incremental increases as high as 10-12% in reach.” Moreover, he says, “we know the efficacy of the local campaign resonated because the advertiser came back and renewed for a second campaign.”

Leveraging new ad creative, audience targeting, and measurement technologies and then layering local advertising on top of national ads to expand reach and impact is the strategy through which Locality guides its clients. Locality is taking the general push for “incremental reach across every campaign” to a level well beyond “table stakes,” says DeMain. As he explains, “there’s plenty of information and services available that allow advertisers to determine how to drive incremental reach.” But what’s critical, he says, “is to define success for the advertiser.” That means, he adds, considering both streaming and broadcast options, applying measurement recommendations, and “delivering efficacy, whether it’s through a brand study, conversion tracking, or a foot traffic study, depending on the particular advertisers’ KPIs.” The result: “It’s a one-two punch where value is delivered to both the agency and the advertiser.”

Focus on Strategy Before Tactics

Pursuing this approach, DeMain stresses, is best started strategically. “We apply the tactics once we understand the strategy,” he says. For instance, while a brand focused strictly on national advertising might say, “I’m buying the entire country, and that’s part of my strategy,” a local advertising strategy is going to vary market by market “because there are a variety of different market conditions that impact it.”

One example might be a retailer concerned about in-store foot traffic when facing inclement weather conditions in their markets across half the country. “That is going to affect how many people go into the store,” DeMain points out. “So if we start with an understanding of the advertiser’s broad strategy and goals, then narrow in on the best approach through which the advertiser can maximize reach in each market, we will determine the best strategy market-by-market. This allows us to take it a step further, by solving for the varying tactics in each market depending on the advertiser’s overall objective.”

A number of emerging data-driven technologies are fueling advertisers’ ability to effectively extend their campaigns locally, and these, DeMain notes, allow advertisers to “really measure reach and frequency on a local level, across both streaming and broadcast, that they couldn’t do even a year ago.” He points to ACR technology, which “lives inside smart TVs and provides measurement of every creative and piece of content that is delivered through the glass more effectively.” With advancements in artificial intelligence, digital creative, and “dynamic creative, much of what you see in display ads and social ads you can now apply to video for a holistic local approach.”

Data-driven enhancements on local campaign measurement have been particularly important. As DeMain puts it, “With these advancements, advertisers can measure reach and frequency on a local level,” which provide a more accurate assessment “across streaming and broadcast, allowing us to guide advertisers and agencies on the optimal mix of these video channels, by market.” With these insights, he adds, “advertisers can understand the type of messaging or the scale of an audience on streaming or broadcast in a specific market. Layering in the localized creative messaging and audience targeting capabilities on top of that, advertisers can determine how to optimize local campaigns from a performance perspective in real time.”

Not One-Size-Fits-All

How that campaign is optimized and how tactics are developed to advance the overall strategy is dependent on a range of factors. “Local is a different approach to meet each consumer where they are, which is different than a one-size-fits-all national campaign,” DeMain says.

For example, a larger agency, with more resources at its fingertips, may have a strategy in place with a “toolbox of tactics” at its disposal. Given that, DeMain notes, “we have a lot of local ad supply that larger agencies can have access to, whether it’s streaming or broadcast, and we can help guide them by localizing a national campaign, determining which markets are underserved, and layering on local strategy and tactics to reinforce the campaign.”

Independent agencies, on the other hand, DeMain says, not only already tend to work with more regionalized advertisers but generally “have more insight around their markets because they’re in the market already.”

In either case, leveraging local measurements that are available is key. “If an advertiser is focused on the creative that it’s produced,” DeMain explains, “the advertiser shouldn’t necessarily change that overall strategy because there tends to be a lot of development or insights that have gone into the creative itself.” If the goal is to drive up the efficacy of a specific creative within a specific campaign, he says, “we tend to look at the measurement—for example, a brand lift study or website visits—and whether they’re trying to drive audiences to a website or foot traffic to a specific location, then determine what data tells us in terms of the performance and apply that to a recommendation.”

Informing that recommendation is the question of how an advertiser is approaching targeting. “How broad of an audience is the advertiser trying to reach?” DeMain asks. While local targeting would focus in on “a ZIP code or a DMA or a state or regional level,” an audience-targeting approach might zero in on a specific type of audience in a geographic area. “It might be,” he explains, “that a regional QSR is targeting people who are interested in unique culinary experiences. Since that audience’s interests are more important than their geographic proximity to a physical store location, the QSR wants everyone in this region to understand that its business caters to the more culinary-focused adventure eater.”

Don’t Over-Engineer

Inherent in building strategies for these campaigns is playing to the relative strengths of streaming and broadcast—and combining them in service to the advertiser. DeMain cites the example of an advertiser who is considering retargeting an ad for CTV. “The advertiser could start by running a campaign on CTV with a broader message,” he says, “and then retarget those users on other devices with a more specific, personalized message.”

Despite all the options now available for more precise targeting—from measurement tools and AI to digital creative technologies—DeMain cautions against the tendency for advertisers to “over-engineer” their campaigns. “When an advertiser says, ‘I want to find a very specific audience in a very specific market in a very specific window,’ we often see those campaigns start to unravel,” he says. “Don’t set yourself up for failure by being too specific.” Instead, “layer on tactics and use the power of streaming and broadcast together to reach a broader audience with your broadcast strategy and then refine it with the tactics of streaming.”

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Part Three:

Local Impact: How mixing streaming and broadcast with a local angle can help build a brand

The explosive growth that streaming has achieved over the past three years alone—a whopping 129% increase in time spent viewing since 2021, according to GfK TVB—has meant that, from a viewership perspective, streaming TV is now on par with broadcast. And when you combine the viewing power of the two platforms, says Keith Kazerman, president of Streaming at Locality, a provider of local advertising services, you’re looking at “great news for the video ad industry.”

The key to taking advantage of this great news, Kazerman says, is not focusing on one platform or the other but combining them through a “holistic planning perspective” that relies on “cross-channel synergy” built on “data-driven precision.” This approach, he continues, is strengthened if you layer in a localized focus. Do this right, he says, and you’ll maximize both reach and ROI—at the same time that you’re building community engagement, expanding brand loyalty, and increasing customer retention.

Here's how—and why—it works.

“Streaming platforms provide the best of video—with the target ability and the influential power of TV glass—combined,” Kazerman says. “Broadcast delivers the mass scale needed for brand exposure and visibility. Combine broad exposure with precision targeting and the advertiser gets real market coverage.” Then, if that advertiser is able to unify the spend with an eye on coverage in specific markets, Kazerman adds, it’s possible to “use the two platforms to aggregate audience data and enable optimization and balance between the reach of broadcast and the frequency of streaming.”

Part of this audience data—and the attempt to find balance—is tied to location. Not only do “all buying decisions happen locally,” Kazerman says, but “no two markets are alike.” This means that no one solution, either in terms of ad buys or even creative execution, will work in every ZIP code. While understanding this may have an impact on the creative an advertiser uses, the impact will also extend to how that advertiser thinks about the spend. Consider, for example, Kazerman suggests, “a retailer who knows, based on sales data, that it’s underserved from an ad penetration standpoint in particular markets. If you look at past streaming and broadcast data and use that as a baseline, you might see that in one market there’s less viewing on broadcast and more on streaming. In another market, that viewership is reversed.”

All Locations Are Not Created Equal

With that in mind, he explains, you can look at the development details. “What’s the right contextual environment for that audience target that you later impart for both broadcast and streaming?” he asks. “What are your budget parameters based on both time spent and behaviors between the demographic and the advanced audience target?” And with that information, he says, you can ask, “What’s the right level of spend to reach that optimal frequency to then produce a business outcome?”

Part of this calculation, however, depends on having a solid grounding in what makes a particular location different from other locations. “When you really dig into local and begin to understand what differentiates the message you’re communicating from a one-size-fits-all approach, you start to break down consumer and consumption habits and all those community differences,” Kazerman says.

That means, he points out, that a QSR looking to attract diners in, say, both New York City and Oklahoma City needs to be steeped in local nuances, ranging from demographics to buying behaviors and brand preferences. Data from MRI-Simmons shows that while QSR diners in Oklahoma City are more likely to be parents and people characterized as “heavy QSR diners,” those in New York are more likely to be affluent, to be considered “light QSR diners,” and to be looking to have their meals delivered. This argues not only for localizing the creative campaigns to meet these different customer needs, but also for finding the optimal mix of streaming and broadcast to allow for precise targeting and, where appropriate, massive market-specific reach.

Finding the right mix, however, is a balancing act. As Kazerman puts it, “We need to be very mindful of the user experience and make sure that brand exposure is done in the right way, so that it has a more positive impact. The goal is to avoid over-saturating one channel and, at the same time, under-utilizing another channel.”

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Critical to this analysis, according to Kazerman, is using a combination of “real-time audience insights, behavioral data, and historical performance.” This allows you to create highly targeted media plans that are informed by data and insights into where to go next. The point, he says, is “you need to look back to go forward.”

But you also need to look forward. Advanced data and measurement tools such as ACR, CRM matchback data, brand lift studies, ROAS, and foot traffic studies, Kazerman says, “involve continuous analysis of the performance data, of the engagement with the audience, of the follow through.” This, in turn, “helps inform the adjustments and optimizations in real time during the campaign to deliver the KPIs that were planned against.”

Given a focus on localizing the ad buy, some of these adjustments are likely to be to the campaign’s creative. Recent data reinforces the logic of this approach. According to Nielsen, more than half of consumers are likely to buy from brands that offer products seen as locally relevant. If those brands engage in community-based advertising, Deloitte reports that almost two-thirds of consumers say they are more likely to support them. And, according to Salesforce, if the brands are seen to be engaging consumers at the local level, those consumers say that those are the brands they prefer.

“You need to have creative that provides the right messaging, the right voice,” Kazerman says. “Localized messaging allows advertisers to create messages that resonate with and are relevant to local communities, that speak directly in a local voice to local audiences. It’s really based on data insights to tailor the ads to those specific populations.” By doing this, he suggests, “you build trust, with the ad speaking directly to local events and local culture, reflecting the community’s values, interests, and dynamics, and fostering a sense of connection between the brand and the community.”

The AI Edge

To help advertisers use data insights as they customize their creative messaging, Locality has frequently turned to artificial intelligence. “We’ve employed AI technology to augment core creative that an advertiser might already have to tailor that message locally,” Kazerman says. Doing this ranges from simply inserting a QR code into the ad to “something a bit more sophisticated like putting an address within specific ZIP codes, to building in a call to action with a URL for a specific store location.” It might also require creating an entirely new commercial driven by AI technology. As Kazerman explains, “This technology has afforded the industry the ability to catch up creatively and target locally in a very precise manner.”

And AI isn’t the only technology that makes this localized approach work. Kazerman notes that “as marketers are looking to reach consumers, the measurability we have in media today”—measurability largely fueled by technology. — “has never been deeper and greater. And this is making media expenditures much more accountable.” He points, in particular, to the ROI that can follow local activations, measured by greater sales, more people in stores, increased website conversions. “The proof is in the practice,” he says. “As advertisers are employing new strategies, they’re building on the success they’re having by taking these actions.”

During a recent MediaPost webinar, Locality’s Keith Kazerman dug even further into all the points raised in this article. To watch the webinar, “Unlock Local Impact: Combining the Power of Streaming and Broadcast Advertising,” including the Q&A session with the audience, click here.

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Part Four:

A Best Practices Guide to Buying Local Video

In previous installments of this series, we’ve looked closely at how advertisers can effectively use data to plan a strategic local ad spend, combining streaming and broadcast platforms. In addition, we’ve shown how, by layering in a localized approach, these same advertisers can engage communities, build brands, and increase customer retention.

Reflecting on decades spent successfully helping brands place localized ads on both streaming and broadcast platforms, Locality, a provider of local video advertising solutions, has developed a set of rules for getting this right. Here are some actionable insights into the thinking behind this guide: 

Start with Strategy

When developing the strategy, says Steve DeMain, Locality’s executive vice president of sales, it’s important to first understand the brand and who it’s trying to reach. What markets are they in? How is their business, and their competitors’ businesses, doing market by market? Who is their target audience? What do we know about that audience in each market: interests, hobbies, buying behaviors that can be applied? “Once we have that general framework,” DeMain says, “we can look at streaming and broadcast,” both of which, he says, are foundational and “should be part of any plan.” Part of this strategy should also include planning to leverage the right measurement tools, so that you’re ready to apply them immediately when you activate the campaign. From the local media partner’s perspective, this includes understanding what the advertiser is looking for in terms of reporting.

Vet Your Partner, Validate the Audience, Avoid Ad Fraud

DeMain advises advertisers to address this issue head-on in the pre-campaign planning phase. “Make sure that the partner you’re working with has a way of validating the audience and the local ad impressions you’re going to be running,” he says. While this is less of a challenge with broadcast since, as DeMain puts it, “the TV is the TV for broadcast,” it can be an issue on the streaming side. But it shouldn’t be. Asking these questions upfront will ensure that the right measurement tools and the right protocols are in place, making sure that “all of the locally targeted impressions you’re receiving from your campaign are fraud-free.”

Take Brand Suitability into Account

Early in the planning stage, let your local advertising partner know exactly where your sensibilities are. The partner, DeMain says, “wants to make sure they’re putting you in the right context from an advertiser perspective, aligned with the content that matters most for your target audience and not next to something that might be of concern.”

Consider Creative

“Creative management is really important,” DeMain says. What creative does the advertiser have? Is it one ad or different ads for every market? If it’s a single creative, “how can we enhance it for market-specific attributes like store locations, SKUs, weather, and seasonality? What technologies—such as artificial intelligence—can we bring in to personalize it, addressing each market’s nuances, while maintaining the authenticity of the brand message?” On the other hand, if the advertiser wants to be in 20 markets and already has 20 different ads each, “then we might not need to layer any dynamic messaging on top of that because they’re already addressing for local personalization.”

Start Measuring on Day One

Once the campaign is activated, DeMain says, “start measuring it immediately.” This is critical because every advertiser wants to know, as quickly as possible, how their local video ad impressions are pacing, across platforms, in their optimal markets. This goes for ad effectiveness metrics like conversions and foot traffic, too. “Speed matters,” DeMain says. But more than that, he adds, “As soon as some of those insights start coming back, they should be used to optimize the campaign—on both sides, streaming and broadcast.”

Use Available Tools

However, says DeMain, only use the measurement tools you’re comfortable with and are compatible with your local campaign’s KPIs: “If you’re not really comfortable with them, maybe you don’t want to use those specific tools on your first campaign.” At the same time, advertisers need to be proactive in terms of letting their local media partners know which KPIs are important to them so they can, as DeMain puts it, “get ahead of it and be able to report back quickly, for data-informed optimizations.”

Be Flexible

Sometimes, DeMain cautions, it can be challenging to be flexible with local campaigns. For example, he points out, budgets might sit in different video ad buying groups, siloed between linear and streaming TV. However, he stresses, “baking flexibility into the ad spend gives you the ability, should you need it, to shift some of that local budget in one direction, like streaming video, or the other, like broadcast TV, to accommodate the overall campaign strategy.”

Be Transparent

Transparency is everyone’s responsibility. Advertisers must be as transparent as possible from the start about what they’re trying to accomplish, and the media partner, DeMain notes, “needs to be equally transparent about what it’s delivering to that customer.” This avoids questions later in the process about what had been promised at the start. As DeMain puts it, “In the long run, whoever does the best job of delivering to the customers is going to win.”

Don’t Over-Engineer

“At the end of the day,” DeMain notes, “this is local video advertising. Either somebody’s watching a television through a satellite coming down or a broadcast signal or they’re watching it over the internet. It’s still on a big screen in their living room. So don’t overthink it. Don’t overengineer it.” The point at which campaigns start to unravel, DeMain cautions, is “when an advertiser says, ‘I want to find a very specific audience in a very specific market in a very specific window. Don’t set yourself up for failure by being too specific.” Instead, he suggests, “layer on tactics and use the power of local streaming and broadcast together to message precise audiences with streaming and extend that with the broader reach of your local broadcast strategy.”

Immediately Start Developing the Strategy for the Next Campaign

If you’ve done it right, all the way from pre-campaign strategic development to post-campaign measurement, you should be able to take the insights, evaluate the performance, and, working with your local media partner, find two or three things to do differently the next time around. This, DeMain says, “simplifies the overall process from a strategy perspective. At that point, we will have added a few new tactics and will be using the data we’re getting back from a campaign to inform the next one—maximizing your brand’s local impact one incremental step at a time.”

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Part Five:

Localized Advertising: How Do You Know It Works?

Over the course of this series, we’ve examined the case for localizing ad campaigns, explored the merits of focusing a localized ad spend on both streaming and broadcast platforms, and explained the impact that new technologies have had on targeting specific audiences in specific markets in specific ways.

What we’ve found is an increased appetite among both brands and consumers for a local approach to advertising, whether those ads are accompanying sports, news, or entertainment programming. While it’s clear that different markets behave differently, we’ve seen that the precision targeting of streaming video combined with the wide reach of broadcast provides effective coverage in those markets. This has become especially true in recent years as streaming’s unmatched growth has shifted viewership dramatically, further fragmenting the way consumers access their favorite video content.

However, as we’ve reported, what determines the success of a localized campaign is the ability to pull together behavioral, contextual, and demographic insights in order to understand—and act upon—local consumer preferences and their video consumption patterns.

And this, of course, has become more complicated as the media landscape has become more fragmented. As Hanna Gryncwajg, senior vice president, Commercial, at Comscore , a leading cross-platform measurement provider, points out, consumers are constantly changing, and advertisers need to meet them where and how they are consuming content. “Fragmentation has caused massive disruption. Pre-pandemic, advertisers were able to attain a strong reach number with their linear campaigns. But today that is difficult to achieve,” In the face of that, she notes, what companies like Comscore are doing, is “stitching those impressions back together so that buyers can achieve the reach they were used to six or seven years ago.” Doing this, she adds, means “using a unified measurement approach”— that calibrates streaming, linear, digital, and mobile impressions all together from one source—and provides advertisers with the “opportunity to extend their reach, measure it, and improve campaign performance in a deduplicated manner.”

And this makes it increasingly important that brands are able to accurately and quickly measure the impact of their campaigns, “knowing how one platform performs versus another and illustrating the incrementality of those platforms over linear helps us better direct spending and allows us to optimize within specific platforms,” Gryncwajg says.

In the past, says Keith Kazerman, president of Streaming at Locality, a provider of local video advertising services, the fragmentation of measurement amounted to “a thumb in the air.” What’s necessary—and possible—now is greater transparency and “a comprehensive view of local video ad campaigns.”

Getting and acting upon this comprehensive view involves four interconnected steps, says Kazerman:

1)    Taking a unified measurement approach, which “allows advertisers to make informed decisions, understanding how each channel contributes to the overall media mix at the local level.”

2)    Granular data analysis, which allows advertisers to dive deep into specific audience metrics in specific locations.

3)    Sales attribution tools, which track conversions by target markets.

4)    Real-time adjustments, which allow for course corrections after data from the other steps is taken into consideration.

Unified Measurement Approach

As Kazerman describes it, unified measurement “brings together data from multiple channels, both streaming and broadcast, into a single framework that provides the comprehensive view of a brand’s campaign performance across all platforms.” The integration of data, he says, “avoids silos,” allowing advertisers to “track cross-platform performance and measure an overall campaign’s effectiveness—across multiple markets— in one cohesive view.”

Comscore’s process, Gryncwajg notes, “measures the impressions from both linear and digital, including streaming. Comscore’s proprietary personification approach then takes household counts down to a person level, allowing for a demographic view into all the co-viewers exposed to a campaign on TV and CTV. PC and mobile assignments are powered by insights from Comscore’s digital panel and demographic partners. From there Comscore’s cross-platform solution (Comscore Campaign Ratings) deduplicates across platforms providing a single overall reach value.” The ability to “view all sorts of metrics and dimensions,” she adds, “can give both the buy-side and the sell-side tremendous opportunity to create their own narrative, to collect insights, and to optimize campaigns in real time.”

This unified approach, Kazerman says, serves as “an insurance policy, making sure that all aspects of that campaign are working together in a harmonious way to optimize the return on ad spend.”

Granular Data Analysis

In terms of acceptance, Kazerman says, cross-platform analysis has become commonplace. “It is mirroring what user behavior is,” he says, adding that “unified measurement is now essential for any brand looking to understand the true impact of their ad spend—especially their local spend in multiple markets.”

What makes the measurement useful, however, is an advertiser’s ability to do granular data analysis, “to break down the data by demographics, location, time of day, and then understanding what that behavior is in terms of campaign performance.” That means, Kazerman says, “utilizing analytic tools that can capture all of the information about how ads are performing in different contexts on specific platforms in specific local markets as well as with that specific audience target segment.”

Gryncwajg notes that with Comscore’s granular dashboard, for example, “you can see age, gender, sex, and also extended demographics, household income, ethnicity, and who’s watching on each platform.”

The data can also point to some trends that would otherwise seem counterintuitive. For example, Gryncwajg says, while news viewership tends to “skew a bit older,” Comscore has found instances where news viewership on mobile is younger. That means, she says, “there is this brand-new audience that a brand could capture on mobile watching its news programming” that might otherwise not have been reached.

Having so much granularity “in a dashboard,” Gryncwajg adds, “provides a complete look at how the campaign is performing, as well as the audiences that are viewing the campaign across the different platforms. Knowledge is power.”

Sales Attribution Tools

And what makes the granular data especially powerful, according to Kazerman, is pairing it with sales attribution tools. “This enables us in real-time to understand how web conversions are happening,” he says. “Are we utilizing the right audience targeting? Are we in the right context? Is the medium mix appropriate?” The answers to those questions are “based on how we’re evolving, how we’re using specific attribution data coupled with, for example, ACR [automatic content recognition] data to see what the media consumption is at the local level.”

And while, he admits, it’s complicated, Locality’s role is to “simplify all these complications, to track the customer journey from different platforms and touchpoints, to assign credit to the ads that have directly influenced a consumer’s purchase or engagement, and to understand not only how those different deliverables are being driven by specific channels across, streaming, digital, and broadcast, but also how different creative is performing against those locally targeted audience segments.”

As brands have moved from simply worrying about “impressions” to focusing on “last-click attribution” to expecting “multitouch attribution models,” they have, Kazerman points out, “become much more focused on ROI.” What sales attribution tools provide, he notes, are a means for “determining effectiveness, for really understanding how every dollar spent is smarter in performing against your brand goals."

Real-Time Adjustments

As valuable as this information is in terms of knowing how well a localized ad campaign strategy has worked, what may be more critical is what a brand can do with that information—not just in terms of planning future campaigns, but in terms of real-time adjustments to the campaign underway. “It’s all driven by data and insights and technology,” Kazerman says. “Utilizing the measurement and the granular data, you can make a shift during the campaign through which higher performing channels can be doubled down on to extract the most value.”

Despite the ability that advertisers now have to employ unified measurement, granular data analysis, sales attribution tools, and real-time adjustments to understand how well their campaigns are performing—and to take action to improve that performance, “the industry is still on the ground floor in terms of cross-platform adoption,” says Gryncwajg. “That is why it’s important to utilize tools like Locality’s Reach+, and enable clients to measure streaming alongside linear.  Comscore’s cross-platform solution measures campaign performance in every single local market. Through our partnership with Locality we're able to continue to innovate in local media, one of the most impactful ways of reaching consumers. The industry still has progress to make, but working with leaders in local cross-platform advertising and measurement that offer these capabilities—partnering to improve the fragmented ecosystem overall—helps simplify the process of executing successful local campaigns and proving ROI for brands.”

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Part Six:

Localized Advertising: Why It’s the People’s Choice

How important is localized advertising to consumers—and why? Consider these findings from Locality’s new consumer research study, “The Local Lift: How Local Video Campaigns Increase Consumer Action,” conducted by The Harris Poll:

• 68% of video viewers are extremely or somewhat engaged in their local communities.
• 85% of video viewers believe it’s extremely or somewhat important to purchase from local businesses.
• 71% of all video viewers say they expect advertising messages to be localized.
• Video viewers are 6 times more likely to say that brands featured in local ads are part of the community than are brands that only advertise nationally, and local video ad viewers are 4 times more likely to trust those brands versus national advertisers.
• While only 13% of video viewers say they are likely to purchase from brands that only advertise nationally, 53% say they are likely to purchase from advertisers that localize their ads.

“We watch culture at the Harris Poll all the time,” says Jennifer Musil, managing director, Strategy and Go to Market, at The Harris Poll, a market research firm. “And we talk with consumers about a lot of things, so the fact that people responding to this new survey are really invested in their local communities and like to support local businesses was not surprising. It’s very rare that we ask something about interaction with local communities where people aren’t passionate about it.”

What Musil did find particularly interesting, however, was “how much people trust local ads and how strong the impact is as indicated through their experiences with those businesses that took the time to localize a message.”

In reflecting on the results of this research, which surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. video viewers 18 and older who watch at least one hour of TV weekly in October 2024, Shalyn O’Malley, Locality’s senior vice president of marketing, says, “the findings reinforced what we had anticipated in terms of local advertising driving relevance and creating authenticity. But what we were hoping to see and were happy to discover is the extent to which local advertising actually influences purchase behavior.”

The Gen Z Connection

While the majority of survey respondents indicated an engagement with local businesses—and with the brands that localized their ad campaigns—it was the Gen Z and younger Millennials, between the ages of 18 and 34, who showed the most engagement and responsiveness—with 81% of them saying they expected localized ads, compared to 71% of the general population.

Though she wasn’t surprised by this finding, O’Malley notes that others may have been. “There is a perception that younger viewers aren’t as involved in their communities as older viewers are,” she says, “but clearly, according to the study, that’s not the case.” What’s made the difference for younger audiences, she suggests, might stem from “the pandemic, where people started valuing their communities, creating more work-life balance, and getting more involved.” This, she says, is a good sign since “Gen Z is our future; they’ve got a lot of buying power, so that’s something to pay close attention to—and a great way to do that is through local advertising.”

Musil sees an additional force powering this trend. “The younger population has grown up with technology in a way where content is mostly personalized and localized,” she says. “They’ve grown up with algorithms that feed them content that is specific to their interests and needs. And this bleeds over into how they expect advertisers to speak to them through streaming and broadcast video versus just in the digital and social channels.”

Underscoring this expectation, one young female respondent said, “Local ads make me more likely to pay attention and be interested in the brand because I feel like they relate to me.”

How Do Brands Stay Authentic to the Communities They Serve?

While most respondents felt that localized advertising proved relevance and involvement in the community and inspired not only trust but an interest in purchasing an advertiser’s products, a significant portion reported the need for the local message to express an authentic interest in their communities.

“Viewers are pretty savvy” Musil says. “People are inundated with messaging and content everywhere they look, so the trick for advertisers is to have some sort of meaningful localization to find those connection points with the community and then figure out how to produce ads accordingly, rather than blanketing national ads treating everyone the same.” It’s not enough, she points out, “to say, I’m in Phoenix and I just slapped the Arizona Cardinals logo on something totally unrelated to football. That doesn’t make any sense to the viewer. The connection has to be truly authentic.”

O’Malley agrees. “Every brand has its own authentic personality and identity, and consumers are smart,” she says. “When they’re watching video ads that they feel are just not true or not in alignment with a brand’s identity, they’re not going to feel right about it. It’s up to the brand to understand what their unique and authentic brand values are and connect those to local audiences. When a brand gets that right, it’s super powerful, and that’s when we see the local lift and bigger engagement numbers for advertisers.”

To test the impact—and the perceived authenticity—of local versus national ads, The Local Lift research study divided its sample into two equal groups, one of which was nationally representative and one of which was comprised of viewers in a handful of selected DMAs. They then presented the national audience with national ads and the local audiences with ads that had been crafted to target their specific DMAs. In one test, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based audience watched an ad for Culver’s, a local QSR, while the national audience saw a national ad with incentivized messaging focused only on the food. The Culver’s ad, Musil explains, “was a simple localization, saying ‘Come on in. We’d love to see you,’ with a simple tagline, ‘From Wisconsin with love.’ They made the ad feel like they were speaking to you in your community without ever directly saying it.”

And the impact? “With the Culver’s ad, the numbers showed a significant lift,” says O’Malley: While similar percentages found the ads interesting and said they watched them until the end, 92% of respondents found the Culver’s ad relevant to their community (compared to 78% for the national ad), 95% said they trusted the advertiser (compared to 81%), and 89% said they would consider Culver’s for their next QSR meal (compared to 75%).

Local Sports, Local News, Local Ads

While it was clear that local ads played well across all parts of the fragmented streaming and broadcast video landscape, the survey highlighted two local programming options that provided viewers with particular relevance: sports and news.

“Sports is inherently local,” says Musil. “It’s a safe place for brands to live.” That was also the conclusion of The Local Lift study, which found that 40% of respondents had a more positive view of brands that advertised during local sports events (compared to only 4% with a more negative view) and 39% said they also trusted those brands more (compared to only 4% claiming a decline in trust).

“News could be seen as being a little bit different,” Musil says, pointing to the months leading up to this fall’s election when “there was a lot of discussion about brand safety in the news environment.” But a recent study conducted by Stagwell, The Harris Poll’s parent company, found that “ads placed adjacent to news topics such as politics, inflation, and crime perform as effectively as those placed next to business, entertainment, and sports stories.” And Locality’s The Local Lift study bore that out on a local level, with 43% of respondents saying they had a more positive view of a brand when it advertised during the local news (compared with 3% who claimed a more negative view) and 40% saying they had more trust in brands that advertised during the local news (again, with only 3% claiming a decline in trust).

The Forces Behind the Trend

Localization, says O’Malley, is a natural outgrowth of changes in the industry. “The current environment, especially on the streaming side, is fragmented across a multitude of services,” she says. “That’s why the ability to guarantee a more authentic relationship with consumers is more valuable than ever—there is simply no one-size-fits-all approach anymore. With so many ways for consumers to engage with content, localization provides marketers with the confidence that their message is truly resonating with consumers, ultimately driving them closer to making a purchase.”

Improvement in local ad creative has helped as well. As Musil notes, “local advertising has come a long way from the days when it was seen as being low-quality creative. In The Local Lift study, we found a lot of great examples of national brands that are making the effort and doing some very successful local advertising—really figuring out how to leverage that level of creative content on a local basis. That’s huge since consumers’ mindsets are already positive toward local ads.”

Powering this, O’Malley adds, are breakthroughs in audience targeting and data as well as technology such as AI, all of which “have enhanced the way we approach local advertising. Our goal is to get as close to the consumer profile as possible in a particular market. And we’re able to identify the markets where national campaigns are missing, or underperforming, and then utilize local to fill in those gaps and deliver a level of incremental reach, creating the best-possible outcome for a campaign’s success.”

Where We Go from Here

In talking with clients and prospects about local advertising, O’Malley says, “independent agencies that have a regional approach already understand the value of local. For some larger advertisers, the challenge may lie in integrating local within larger budgets or campaigns. We are optimistic that research like this study will help make a compelling case for including local advertising as an essential component of regional and large, national media plans. The findings highlight the measurable impact and value that localized strategies can bring advertisers of all sizes. Our hope is that The Local Lift study provides advertisers with actionable insights and a road map for planning local campaigns that effectively connect with audiences and ultimately drive purchases.”