Call it a digital marketing paradox. In the lightning-paced, ever-expanding business of local streaming advertising, two seemingly contradictory, but undeniable, truths are emerging.
The first truth: Local video advertising is booming. According to The Local Lift, a Harris Poll commissioned survey in late 2024, 71% of all Americans expect advertising messages to be localized; those numbers jump to 81% for the highly sought-after 18- to 34-year-old demo.¹ The continued growth in advertising-based video on demand (AVOD) combined with the local demand is exponential, as is the evolving tech and AI landscape around the growth.
That leads to the second truth: Local video advertising technology has traditionally lagged behind. Advertisers often face fragmented inventory, making it difficult to deploy and adjust precision targeting at local levels—especially when speed is critical; and deriving accurate and actionable measurement metrics down to a finite level can be tough. Once campaigns are set, the previous technologies have lacked flexibility to adjust the content, audiences and more. Across the board, there’s been a demand to simplify the local buying process to make it easier to activate at scale, and report results.
What advertisers need is a platform that can unify a complicated cross-platform local video landscape while providing data, micro-targeting, measurement and transparency with scale and optionality.
An all-in-one media buying solution for local ads
Locality, a longtime provider of local TV advertising infrastructure, recognized this market gap. “Buying local advertising at scale is a deeply complex business,” said Zach Mullins, chief strategy officer for Locality. “It has traditionally been a manual process—spread across a variety of spreadsheets and software—making the different components of a buy complicated.”
The company saw an opportunity to create an all-in-one media buying solution purpose-built for local advertising buyers. The result, after nearly a year of testing and development, is a new media platform, LocalX, which launched earlier this month. The platform was designed in response to common operational barriers that local advertisers face and to simplify how advertisers plan, buy and manage local video campaigns.
“LocalX is a new end-to-end platform that gives customers streamlined access to Locality’s inventory and local media expertise—essentially a front door into our technology, teams and tools,” said Mullins. “It supports both direct IO and programmatic workflows, connecting buyers to trusted streaming partners like Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount and others, all within a centralized environment.”
The LocalX platform builds on Locality’s established innovations—such as Reach+, which uses automatic content recognition (ACR) technology for incremental reach measurement—layered with insights gained from supporting more than 6,000 advertisers and over 24 billion locally targeted ad impressions. It also offers access to the leading streaming publishers, including Amazon Prime Video, Max, Fubo and Roku. It introduces new features and functionality, from AI-powered campaign tools to a streamlined user interface reminiscent of a Bloomberg Terminal—designed to solve the fragmented challenges that local advertising buyers faced, which allows them to move faster, with more control and precision.
“This new technology takes decades of best practices combined with learnings from thousands of local campaigns and builds them directly into the platform,” said Mullins. “It reflects what works in local—giving buyers a smarter way to plan, execute and optimize campaigns across premium inventory, in one central place, while also providing metrics advertisers can easily pull and report on.”
Scale, intelligence and performance—the advertising trifecta
“This platform provides a new level of flexibility that was not possible when managing multiple documents and systems,” said Mullins.
That translates into giving clients the ability to choose between a hands-on managed-service approach to their campaigns or a more independent, self-service environment. “We can fully build out the media plan and send it back, creating a managed-service experience,” Mullins explained. “Or brands can go a self-service route and actually tap into the inventory themselves, build out the individual line items, and manage the process on their own.”
LocalX’s dynamic user interface is customizable for each partner and includes real-time insights, an integrated news feed, live campaign data points and full CRM integration. It is integrated into and connected to Locality’s learning management system (LMS) for any sales resources the user might need, including knowledge bases and campaign planning tools.
AI creative tools are also embedded directly into the platform. This allows users to quickly give existing ads a local makeover or generate new creative from scratch. “As users move through the process, they can build customized ads with AI or deploy advanced creative experts to do that for them,” said Mullins. As noted in The Local Lift survey, video advertising containing localized messaging has been shown to provide substantial gains in consumer trust, relevance and purchase considerations. As for next steps, Mullins said Locality is continuing to build out machine learning and AI development within the interface.
“LocalX is the intersection of local expertise, technology and performance,” said Mullins. “The ‘X’ represents our focus on leveraging local expertise to create more effective campaigns. It stands for local amplification, unlocking greater scale and access to premium inventory to enable more precise targeting. At its core, it’s about optimizing performance at a local level, powered by actionable, data-driven insight.”
“Our goal is to make local advertising smarter, more adaptable and more impactful for our partners,” Mullins said.
Sources:
1. “The Local Lift, How Local Video Campaigns Increase Consumer Action,” November 2024, Locality and The Harris Poll
About Locality
Locality is the industry’s preeminent local video solutions provider, committed to addressing the evolving needs of advertisers by unlocking the power of local and driving dollars to the local video marketplace. Locality brings together the best talent in both broadcast and streaming helping brands tap into the mindset of the local consumer and precisely reach optimal markets. Having served more than 6,000 advertisers to date, Locality offers the best premium inventory that the industry has to offer to help brands optimize their spend and target audiences at scale with direct access to over 150 streaming publishers and more than 400 local broadcast stations. Our team operates from 11 locations across the U.S. designed to strategically service 100% of DMAs. For more information, please visit www.locality.com
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