Streaming Video Gives Local Media New Path To National Ad Dollars.

The surge in digital video advertising is doing more than shifting dollars from traditional television to streaming. It is expanding the pool of money available to local media — and one industry executive thinks a potentially huge chunk of national advertising could eventually be up for grabs.

Locality CEO Michael Collins predicts that as national advertisers get more sophisticated about using streaming video to target consumers market by market, more of their budgets will effectively become local buys.

“I don't think it's a stretch to say that we could start seeing 25% of national dollars starting to overlay a geographic skew,” Collins says on Borrell Associates’ “Local Marketing Trends” podcast. That would represent a significant new opportunity for local media companies building video businesses while smaller local businesses that historically haven't been television advertisers are also making their move. Both trends are helping fuel a streaming-video category that Borrell says is the fastest-growing of the 18 media formats it tracks.

“Advertising follows eyeballs,” Collins says. But he argues audience migration is only part of the story. Automation, targeting and measurement are making video advertising accessible to more small businesses while giving national brands greater ability to tailor campaigns geographically.

Yet national advertisers deciding they want local targeting doesn't automatically mean the dollars will arrive on station doorsteps. Collins says the keys are “scale and relevance.” A broadcaster may have a valuable local audience, but a national advertiser isn't necessarily interested in assembling hundreds of individual buys to reach those audiences across the country. The solution could look a lot like what happened to digital publishing when programmatic advertising took hold.

Before programmatic, websites largely relied on their own sales forces to sell their individual audiences. Technology eventually allowed advertisers to find desirable consumers across multiple publishers and combine them into a single buy. Collins sees a similar path for local media. Consolidation can create the larger footprints national advertisers want, but so can technology, third-party aggregators and commercial partnerships that bundle inventory from independently owned outlets.

Streaming is also bringing a new class of advertisers into video — businesses that may never have considered buying traditional television. Borrell research shows 1.7 million new U.S. businesses were created between 2020 and 2025. With streaming providing what Collins calls an “on-ramp” to video advertising for smaller brands, he sees plenty of room for that advertiser base to expand.

“I don't think we're saturated at all,” he says. “In fact, I think a lot of those smaller players with that on-ramp are just getting warmed up.”

Some of the categories moving into streaming video may not be the ones local sellers have traditionally focused on. Borrell CEO Gordon Borrell says in a market like San Antonio, racetracks, insurance services, and home healthcare are the biggest spenders, with medical doctors and real estate also growing categories.

“These are not TV advertisers, and this is where all the new money seems to be coming from,” Borrell says. “There is such an influx of new businesses, people don't see them, and there's been the collapse of businesses that broadcasters, in particular, keep going after.”

The challenge is that if new ad categories are entering video while national brands simultaneously begin pushing more money toward individual markets, local media companies need inventory capable of capturing both.

“It's incumbent on media companies to develop an awful lot of local content that the local opportunity for the brands,” Borrell says. He points to high school sports and local coverage built around national sports as examples of programming that can generate additional video inventory. “If you develop more content, that's a whole lot of opportunity at the local level that's beyond local,” Borrell says.