Total TV, Local Dollars: How Ad Tech Is Rewriting the Rules for Local Media Sales

Read Time: 7 minutes

Since the earliest days of commercial television, advertising has paid the bills. Spots were sold, scheduled and dropped into fixed breaks, and everyone in the local media ecosystem—from TV stations to agencies—worked from the same playbook.

That playbook is being rewritten.

A rapidly maturing layer of “ad tech” now sits between content and commercials, deciding which ads run, where they run, and in front of whom. What started as simple scheduling software has grown into a full technology stack that routes campaigns across linear TV, streaming apps, connected TVs (CTVs), mobile devices and laptops—often with a high degree of personalization.

For local media sellers and agencies, this is no longer someone else’s problem in New York or Silicon Valley. It’s reshaping how local inventory is packaged, priced and measured—and which local outlets win the next budget.

From Spots and Breaks to Data and Impressions

“Some broadcasters are enabling programmatic advertising on their traditional linear platforms,” said Allan Nicholson, senior director of advertising solutions and strategy at Harmonic. In plain language, that means they’re letting automated, data-driven systems buy and sell commercial slots where only old-fashioned spot buys used to live.

At the same time, he said, many of those same broadcasters are becoming more streaming-focused and “adopting streaming ad tech for personalization.” They’re also enabling distributors and service providers to monetize with dynamic ad insertion (DAI), which swaps ads in and out of a stream in real time.

“The way to think of this,” Mr. Nicholson said, “is as a linear-to-programmatic application for monetization, as opposed to the programmatic-to-linear trend we saw earlier.”

For a local sales rep, that jargon translates into something simple but powerful:

• The same newscast can now carry different ads to different households.
• “TV spots” are increasingly sold as impressions against audiences, not just as positions in a break.
• Buyers can demand the same level of targeting they get from search and social—and expect local media to keep up.

New Ad Formats, Same Local Fans

Streaming, especially live sports, has become a laboratory for new ad formats. Nicholson points to L-shaped “double box” ads, squeeze backs that shrink the live feed to make room for a message, and overlays such as banners or tickers that ride alongside the main program.

“They’re all opting to do this server-side,” he said, meaning the ad stitching is handled centrally before it ever reaches the viewer’s device. “These new ad formats are really all about increasing ad loads while maintaining engagement and avoiding ad fatigue.”

To a local car dealer, hospital or bank, “L-shaped ad units” will sound like alphabet soup. To a local seller or agency, however, they’re an opportunity:

• Sports sponsorships that keep the game visible while the advertiser’s logo or offer wraps the screen.
• Squeeze-back promos that can highlight local sponsors during time-outs, news teases, or weather alerts.
• Overlay ads that bring in incremental revenue without cutting another 30-second spot into an already crowded break.

The creative canvas is getting bigger, not smaller. The question for local media is whether their sales teams and agency partners are ready to sell that canvas.

Viewers Don’t See “Linear” and “Digital”—They Just See TV

If the technology has become more complex, the viewer’s perception has gone in the opposite direction.

“Broadcasters and streaming providers are under growing pressure to bridge the gap between linear and digital operations,” said Dan Walsh, senior vice president of product management at Imagine Communications. “Audiences don't distinguish between platforms; they simply expect access to content wherever and however they choose to watch.”

Many broadcasters, he noted, still manage linear and digital as two separate businesses—two systems, two teams, two sales stories. That can create inefficiencies and “limits their ability to fully monetize inventory.”

To address that, the industry is moving toward what Walsh calls “Total TV”—a unified advertising approach that focuses less on how the content is delivered and more on the value of the audience.

Behind the scenes, he said, that shift is being driven by automation across ad sales, trafficking and optimization. Automation “reduces costs, improves yield and frees teams from the manual processes that have long defined traditional ad sales.”

For local sellers and agencies, Total TV may be the single most important concept to master.

It allows a rep to walk into a client’s office and say:

• “We can reach your audience on live local news, your favorite streaming apps and CTV in one plan.”
• “We can manage frequency across platforms, not just within one channel.”
• “We can show you a unified report instead of three different spreadsheets.”

In a world where budgets are tight and CMOs are under scrutiny, the promise of one plan, one audience and one set of metrics is a powerful differentiator.

Why Impression-Based Selling Is Winning

With streamers now delivering live, linear-style programming as well as on-demand content, the language of TV buying is changing.

“The reason why streamers chose to use a digital platform is primarily because of impression-based sales—or, put another way, addressable offerings,” said David Dembowski, chief revenue officer at Operative.

One of his clients, he noted, operated for years with break-based ad sales—selling spots by position in the program. Recently, that company shifted decisively to impression-based selling. “There are a lot of reasons for this,” he said, “but it is mostly because of targeting and measurement.”

Through the introduction of impression-based sales on what he calls “the big screen,” TV has become a “full funnel advertising platform.” Marketers can still use high-profile placements for mass awareness—like a major auto or movie launch—but can then layer on buys that zero in on defined customer segments based on behavior and interest.

He points to Amazon’s Prime Video deal for “Thursday Night Football” as a case study. “What they've been able to do is expand the total addressable marketplace of advertisers that had never even considered buying the NFL on prior platforms,” Mr. Dembowski said. “It's created an unprecedented opportunity for new advertisers to get exposure to an audience that was out of reach for years.”

Local media may never own NFL rights. But the lesson travels: when premium content becomes addressable and impression-based, mid-market and local advertisers suddenly have a path into inventory that used to be exclusively national.

For local agencies and sellers, that opens up three new conversations:

1. Onramp packages that let a local brand “test TV” through streaming or CTV with smaller budgets.
2. Segmented campaigns that treat heavy users, lapsed customers and prospects differently.
3. Performance narratives that connect impressions to site visits, store traffic or lead conversions.

Measurement: The Real Prize of CTV and OTT

When people hear “personalization,” they often imagine different creative for every individual. In practice, the more immediate value in CTV and OTT may be measurement.

“The reason is that personalization makes you think of an ad targeted at an individual,” said Paul Davies of Yospace. “What we see is that the true value of CTV/OTT advertising is in measurement.”

Because CTV and OTT can report back on viewing at the household or device level, “we are able to deliver real-time viewing metrics on a one-to-one addressable level,” Davies said. For advertisers, that means they can get similar types of metrics from a broadcaster’s CTV inventory as they’re used to seeing from social platforms or other digital channels.

For years, local media sellers have watched search and social win budget on the strength of dashboard screenshots. Now, they can push back with their own:

• Completion rates for video ads.
• Household reach and frequency across apps and channels.
• Attribution metrics that tie exposures to website activity, app installs or in-store visits.

The creative may still be a familiar 15- or 30-second spot. The difference is that the reporting can now stand side by side with Google and Meta. That changes the tone of every local media conversation.

AI Enters the Ad Tech Stack

Like almost every other part of the media business, ad tech is absorbing artificial intelligence—cautiously but steadily.

Dan Walsh at Imagine said AI in ad tech is “in its early stages” but already being used to identify and enhance the factors that produce better campaign results. “By combining optimization tools with AI capabilities,” he said, “broadcasters can further refine audience targeting and campaign performance.”

At Operative, Dembowski sees AI as a way to “accelerate the knowledge, workflows and outcomes” across the sales cycle. Applying AI to onboarding data has “cut times by more than half,” he observed. In an environment where local sales teams are being asked to do more with less, that kind of efficiency is not a luxury.

Harmonic’s Nicholson said his company is using “homegrown AI technologies” to help advertisers target audiences based on what’s actually in the video frames just before an ad break—contextual signals, not personal identity data. “This means you don't have to use personal identity information and can avoid regulatory issues,” he said.

There is also talk of generative AI for creative itself—producing “truly personalized ad creatives” for individual viewers. For now, executives say, there are legal and technical hurdles, particularly around brand safety and quality. As Davies noted, one reason TV advertising retains its appeal is that it is perceived as premium, controlled and safe for brands.

For local markets, the immediate AI opportunity is simpler: use AI-enhanced tools to plan, optimize and report campaigns faster—and to tell a more sophisticated story to clients in less time.

What This Means for Local Sellers and Agencies

The relationship between traditional TV and streaming ads may still be complicated. But the underlying direction is clear: the tools that once lived only in national and digital platforms are reaching into local markets.

For local media sales reps and local agencies, that suggests a new checklist:

• Learn the language. Terms like DAI, CTV, OTT, Total TV and impression-based buying are now part of the day-to-day vocabulary of your clients.
• Sell audiences, not just spots. Frame proposals around who you reach and how often, across platforms—not just the number of :30s in the 6 p.m. news.
• Package linear and digital together. Present unified plans that treat TV, streaming and CTV as one system, not competing products.
• Lead with measurement. Use CTV/OTT metrics to show that local media can be as accountable as digital while delivering a premium environment.
• Use AI and automation as a selling point. Explain how smarter optimization and contextual targeting help clients waste less and get more from their budgets.

Ad tech will not make bad creative work. It won’t guarantee that every campaign is a hit. But it is giving local media and agencies new ways to compete in a world where every impression is counted, every platform is connected, and every advertiser is looking for more proof that their dollars are working.

The commercials your viewers see may soon be more relevant—or at least less maddening. For local sellers, the real question is whether they’ll be the ones booking those spots, or watching someone else do it.

Source: https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/broadcasters-see-more-potential-in-programmatic-advertising?lrh=6f48e29540d50251bfa5894c580544580695868f309fa686577313fa198302f