AI, Automation And The Reinvention Of Local Media

What happens when AI starts reshaping not just how local advertising is bought and sold, but how local media companies define themselves?

This week on In the Vicinity, Tim Hanlon and Madhive CEO Jim Wilson dig into how AI is reshaping the future of local media — from advertising sales and campaign management to audience targeting, creative optimization, and cross-platform planning.

The conversation explores how automation and agentic AI could eliminate friction across the local advertising ecosystem, turning broadcasters and media sellers into true omni-channel partners spanning CTV, audio, digital out-of-home, and beyond. Tim and Jim also unpack the broader implications of CBS ending The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and shuttering CBS Radio News, and what those moves signal about the future of affiliate models, local stations, and legacy media brands.

Listen to the full In the Vicinity podcast above or get it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Tim Hanlon: Hiya. Hi, everybody. How are you doing? You are In the Vicinity. Welcome to the proceedings. My name is Tim Hanlon. I'm the founder and the CEO of the consultative and advisory firm here in Chicago known as the Vertere Group. We focus on various things in media and technology, helping people through the voluminous change that continues to befuddle and bemuse the media, technology, and related spaces.

I appreciate you coming by, and we are joined again this week In the Vicinity with our colleague, Jim Wilson. He is the CEO of Madhive, as well as a board member of audio company Audacy, as well as the out-of-home place-based video firm GSTV. And we welcome Jim back to our conversational microphones this week as we get back into some banter about some of the things that are challenging all of us in the local media space.

And we're gonna get this episode underway in a second. Our focus really this week is on all things AI. It's certainly been bandied about as a term, and I think depending on where you're looking, the advent of artificial intelligence is either well-known, already being dealt with and/or figured out, or in other circles perhaps just a buzzword that most people don't yet understand.

And we're gonna kinda dig into where AI is now and is likely to play a role in the evolution of local media, and in particular advertising sales and buying, and and the negotiation of such. And we'll have a couple of hot takes on the CBS implosion, what it seems like.

Certainly two pillars of local CBS points of presence, that being the demise of CBS Radio News, which a lot of local radio stations have depended on over the many decades, as well as the ending of the late night show, Late Show With Stephen Colbert in particular. And but the entirety of that day-part which a lot of local stations with the CBS nameplate attached to it have depended upon as their lead out to their late local news.

We're gonna talk about all of that stuff coming right at you now. Here's my chat for this week with Jim and myself. Please, as always, enjoy.

I wanna just get a sense from you in your conversations in the radio world, in the digital out-of-home space, and certainly with what you do day to day at Madhive, where are people freaking out the most and/or most excited about this thing called AI? What functions do people think are going to change dramatically and hopefully for the better?

Jim Wilson: People are freaking out across the board. I've been in digital technology, I think I've talked about this before, right? I've been in technology change my entire career, starting in the games business, going from PlayStation 2 to PlayStation 3, 4, launch of Xbox, all those types of things.

So managing change is exciting. This is an exciting opportunity for all of us. Everyone needs to look at this as an opportunity and not be fearful of it. And that's how we're thinking about it in my company is w- this is a huge opportunity across everything that we do, starting with how we run our business every day, to how we develop our products, to what feature sets are within our products that are improving the lives and the ROIs of all of our clients.

And so across the board, you need to be thinking about AI, and one of my new isms is, if you're not constantly speaking about AI, you got a problem. But we all wanna get to a place where we don't have to talk about AI because that's all we do. And ultimately, it will be woven into how we work every day, how we build products, and built into the products that we're delivering.

And so across the board, there's this massive transformation going on, and it's a great opportunity for anyone. And I just say again, like I said, I say within Madhive, this is an incredible adventure that we've embarked on, and we've proven a lot in a short amount of time with our Maverick platform.

But let's just jump back to the broader context of the industry in general. 

Tim Hanlon: Look, we've talked about this sort of off mic here, and the idea that a lot of the premise or the promise of the generality of AI is better, faster, more efficient, less potentially people or less busywork-oriented people, right?

And more freeing up of time to do things more strategically, more creatively, more voluminously, where humans can't really do all that stuff, and given all the permutations that media digitally is taking us to, right? So that by itself sounds innocuous and promising enough, right? But it still doesn't prevent people from worrying about it, right?

Jim Wilson: Look, when I started Premion now 10 years ago, I realized, it was about bringing products and tools and democratizing all of that for local advertisers so that they had end sellers, that they had the same access that big brands and big agencies had. And I think AI is gonna further that, or I know it's gonna further that.

And to your point, the typical broadcast seller is spending a significant amount of their time doing administrative work, processing orders, filling in forms, et cetera, on disparate platforms that may not be connected, and swivel chairing here. And there are ad ops teams and campaign management teams, and there's a lot of people involved.

And ultimately, the process from developing a pitch, doing a pitch, successfully executing a pitch, and executing a pitch into a campaign that is an- automated all the way through pay, essentially, and optimization and outcomes and everything, is a world that we're all headed into. And so that's a pretty exciting thing.

Tim Hanlon: Yeah. Why don't we break down the advertising part of this, all right? The we can, for another conversation, maybe with some others as well, we could talk about how that helps, how AI generally can help with news gathering or distribution or discoverability of content, that kind of stuff.

But let's break down some of the major advertising functions a little bit. You're double-clicking right now on the sell side of stuff, right? So maybe a little bit more, let's get a little bit more granular perhaps about some of these potential functions that can or maybe can't be enhanced by AI.

I would say one of the first things I would push back on that probably is more challenging to, quote unquote, "improve with AI technologies" is the person-to-person dialogue kind of thing. Maybe it can help translate conversations or transcribe video calls and stuff to make things quicker and stuff.

But I find it hard in the advertising and media spaces to make it less important than the relationships, right? I don't think those are easily automatable. 

Jim Wilson: Not at all. But every kid's taking a- Not at all. I wouldn't even think, yeah, I wouldn't even think of that. I wouldn't. I am so pro-consultative, collaborative sell and high-touch customer service.

I still believe that exists, especially for local advertisers and non-local advertisers. I think that's still really important. But you create an environment around those people where they are provided with tools that basically take large sources of information and quickly basically put that together.

You basically are sitting with a client and you can pull, you can set up a campaign pulling from all different types of resources that you would ha- would have to have had a planning team or a research team do before, where you're pulling information on the category, information on the geography, information on the audiences, testing which audiences may convert better than other audiences you haven't even thought about Audiences that are real time because that audience is being refreshed in that moment using AI, and then, basically looking back at campaign history, whether it's that client or benchmarked against other similar types of campaigns to look at what was the right media mix, what outcomes were delivered, what types of optimizations were done, can all be done like this.

It really quickly now, and you're sitting there and I've always said, I really wanna make the job of local sales to be a really fun job again. And I think being able to sit down with a smart platform, it's not just I don't have to do administrative work anymore and swivel chairs into filling in forms to launch a campaign.

It is, can I show up or can I create, in that moment, a campaign that is pulling all different types of information from all different types of sources? And oh, by the way, creating a piece of creative that speaks to it right there in front of them, because I think a lot of the AI creative right now is being used for prospecting, and I've seen some great AI creative advances recently.

Because for a while they all look the same, but now I'm starting to see really interesting advances in creative where, visually you bring a campaign to life for a customer, you show them the channels that they should be running in and why, what type of outcomes they should be expecting from the campaign, and all of that can be done seamlessly upfront, and that's pretty exciting.

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, I'm scared by what you're dragging me back to which is my first couple of jobs in the ad business. Right back in the late '80s, I was a baby media buyer planner, and that's at the then Leo Burnett media department. That's before all the separation of media from creative and all that kind of stuff.

But Burnett did it in an interesting way, and their training is you were both a planner and a buyer. And if you think about it from the buy side, right? Those two functions alone absolutely can be enhanced and sped up and made more voluminous and more, how can I best describe it? Real time, right?

Because planning itself was almost like a snapshot, and almost a hopeful snapshot of a perfect world, here's how the plan and here the various places where this plan could go would work. Now, of course, we need to hand that off to the buy side. Sometimes it's the same person in the Burnett world.

But in other agencies it was a different person, right? Where the buyer had to do a few things. They would have to receive the plan, interpret it, and then translate it into, if you will, the vernacular of buying, right? It's "Okay, I get you want 1,000 gross ratings points in local television for these cou- these couple of weeks," right?

"But the reality is that this week, two weeks after I got the plan, this is what the landscape really looks like, and these things are sold out, and this show is not even defined yet, and they don't know where they're gonna run in this hour," that kind of stuff, right? So all along that buying process, there are literal stops built into that dynamic.

I think the same is probably on the sales side as well, right? So anything in my mind that can at least smooth out or limit or eliminate those hops in between those functional distinctions will be itself helpful, let alone all the other stuff when you layer in the volume and the real-time visibility.

I think that's a great one, right? The ability for people to see at their fingertips, literally at, in real time, what's available and not, even if it's a pretty, pretty graph and pictures and stuff. You get a sense of what's available and what's not available, and visually, that can help you adjust whatever you're planning for and what- whatever you maybe you're selling or packaging.

Jim Wilson: I get excited about all of it, but, I think eliminating the hops once a campaign is set up, connecting various systems seamlessly, quickly. Now, those systems need to Create agentic connectors, and they're all doing that, and we're working with a platform that's going to be the next generation of our workflow platform that is, connecting anything from OMSs to supply sources so incredibly quickly that it's just speeding all that up, where it took weeks or months before to do connections.

All that is happening. So basically, getting all these systems to talk to each other and talk to each other quickly, and then connecting supply sources as new supply sources come through. I think that's really interesting. Campaign management should be an automated process, right? Anything should be optimizing for audiences.

And by the way, we were talking about this within our Maverick product. Our Maverick product is refreshing audiences and looking at which audiences are gonna convert. And we did a really interesting project with Chevy in terms of, looking at market share gains in one of their regions for six of their nameplates, and looking at which audiences are more inclined and, demographics, psychographics or whatever, that are more likely to convert to drive that market share up, while looking at the market share of their competitors, while looking at the creator and messaging of their competitors and things like that.

So you take all of this into account now, and that's really interesting. And then add on top of that, you can now, and this is something, right-- So I've been around this space for 10 years now, and so you launch a campaign ta-targeting this audience and this content and these zip codes, and you deliver it.

But what if you look at each zip code and you say, "This audience is slightly adjusted in this zip code based upon the nature of this zip code, and by the way, this type of content performs better in this zip code," then we're gonna do that. And that's the way that it gets down. We can do that now, and that it gets down to that level of granularity so that we're maximizing performance and outcomes for our clients.

And that's really interesting. So again, back to like now I feel like I'm digging in way too deep and some people are saying, "You can't do that." The answer is we are doing that, and we're winning business as a result of it. And, frankly, I know some people will smirk at awards, but I think awards are judged on their merits on what they do because you're providing case studies and real-world examples of how you're using it.

And, we continue to kinda show up with Maverick and continue to move Maverick along, and we made an announcement last this week that we're just expanding Maverick across everything that we do, and that was always the intention. We started testing with our clients, with audiences and outcomes. We have basically converted our smart proposal to Maverick Seller, which is everything that I just told you is built into Maverick Seller and Maverick Research, and then basically agentic work that we're now doing within our DSP to be able to continue to optimize and continue to be the best at delivering campaigns within local geographies because we were built originally for local.

And like I always say that local campaigns deserve local technology and local solutions, not local campaigns are relying on national platforms to deliver. They weren't built for local. And so AI gives us so many opportunities to continue to get better and better for clients and, we're big proponents of this across the industry.

And again, like you said, there's so much more that can be done even on the content side. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, look, it's even speeding up these processes, right? So on the buy side, again, you look at how often it was in the old days you would see it in a post-buy or post-buy analysis, and then you would make the adjustments and stuff, right?

In this case, those cycles are much quicker, could be much quicker, certainly within distinct media forms. But as you're hinting the ability for those media forms, especially say in quote-unquote local, which has multiple media forms that have loc- that, that are in the local realm, that are at least harmonized with each other, API'd and otherwise, that can be then sped up amongst, right?

I think the API process is happening, right? There's no question that you can speed up and make more updatable and optimizable within distinct media components, right? But the magic, I think, and the agenticizing, if you will, of that is really where the excitement really occurs, because the ability to equate incongruent media components or pieces and harmonize them in a scheduling way that's much more real time, right?

The problem, though, that takes a lot of vertical industry uniqueness or distinction and asks them to give up some of their own distinction and essentially integrate with the rest of the media landscape for the betterment of all. I think that's probably the biggest challenge, right? I think the outdoor salespeople know that space.

They've certainly brought digital into the realm. But, bringing in audio or bringing in linear television or bringing in CTV linear is, I don't know, that's probably a little bit of a, it's probably a turf war in terms of trying to help connect and/or agenticize those things for the betterment of all.

Jim Wilson: Thank goodness for local, right? Because locally, if you get into sort of the big holdcos I think increasingly the holdcos are looking, look, they got planning teams that plan across different channels, and then they send out the buys to different teams, and they execute them within their teams, right?

In, with a local advertiser, you got either a person and a local account, or you've got a small agency that basically has a handful of people in it. They're not in silos there, right? And and they, they have now have this incredible opportunity to get access to a significant amount of information to do a media mix modeling, basically strategy or approach that allows them to plan TV alongside CTV, alongside audio, along, digital out-of-home and to look at each one of the categories that will slightly adjust based upon the category that you're in, right?

I've been in the out-of-home business, and I know what categories really lean heavily in out-of-home. And so they will all be taken into account in a process that is looking at what is going to be the optimal performance Across each one of these verticals, and then within these verticals, which content sources are going to be optimal and deliver the best performance?

We're working with agencies that are looking at different supply sources and looking at performance of different supply sources, and then what is additive if you add this supply source or subtract that supply source. So there's not just the relationship across categories, it's how do you optimize within the category?

Because at the end of the day, it's all about performance, it will always be about performance, and everyone is gonna be orienting now more toward performance if you haven't already. 

Tim Hanlon: Do you think that maybe things like the Maverick platform you guys have developed and these other things that are trying to harmonize l- local media all together in this fashion, en- enhanced by AI, do you hope maybe that could help break down sort of the provincialism of I'm an outdoor buyer, I'm a radio seller, I'm a TV or linear versus CTV kind of thing, and maybe forces the issue?

Maybe as I think about it, I throw this at you maybe we see the reinvention of how advertising is bought and sold more as a local generalist approach that is expert in all of these things versus being specialists in all these different silos. 

Jim Wilson: That's our aspirations for local sellers at the broadcasters.

The broadcasters, I've seen a, an incredible journey from linear TV into digital over the last 10 years, where we started with CTV and we packaged it alongside linear, and then we started introducing other, f- in some respects, and I've said this before, like the h- broadcasters, it's what we're calling them, you can call them local media companies again, I've said this before, they're in the business of, local news and information and bringing products and supporting local advertising.

And so in many respects they're agencies. And they need to be generalists because they should be bringing multiple products to market for local advertisers in order to maximize the ROI for those local advertisers. And so CTV, being there, it's great. Still, some are better at it than others and s- and many of those others are working hard to get better at it.

That's great. OLV and display, natural, they've been doing it for a while. Audio is surging. Audio is such a great platform. TV broadcasters are now, their sellers are now selling audio, audio sellers are now selling CTV, and, the next is digital out-of-home. And we've launched digital out-of-home, and now local sellers that started selling TV or started selling digital are now selling digital out-of-home.

And if you have a platform that is giving you an informed, intelligent media mix that includes out of home and can explain to you why and what the outcome's going to be, and what platforms to run on and where, I think you've just turned that person into an on-the-channel seller. 

Tim Hanlon: I think what you're also describing is maybe the entry point can be different depending on the situation, right?

And I guess the question I'll wrap up with you, and then I wanna get your opinions on the CBS fracases over the last couple of weeks is I think there's been a default to television and then we'll sell additional CTV inventory. Who's to say television has to be the first and foremost, right?

Maybe there's somebody who believes, like in retail space, in audio because it's so quick and immediate, and we can change the copy and all that stuff. That's the entree, and then we'll bake in out of home and maybe some linear TV too, if there's time available at a reasonable price. I- to me, that feels like a real change afoot, that the opportunity to, to on-ramp can come from all different local sources without having to be TV first, per se, which I think a lot of people just default to for I don't know why 

Jim Wilson: Yeah, you're right.

It's where they start from, but in many cases they can all end up an omni-channel. So TV sellers started selling digital. Radio sellers, by the way, are some of the best sellers in the market. They've always been incredibly scrappy and selling digital on top of radio and, and/or packaging radio with out of home, because you think about the signals of radio and the sig- and basically the impressions of out of home.

And now working with out of home companies, they... It all starts off with, "Here's our main product. Oh, and we can sell you an extension." Now it is, "Here's a product, an extension, and here's why it makes sense and why it increases your performance," to, "Hey, here's an omni-channel. We're leading with this, but it's an omni-channel buy."

It's evolving. It's great. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah. Yeah. In some respects, it's almost like the lead story is a retail story. It's a retail sale. It's direct. It's like you're buying television, we're a television station, it's this- our heritage. But we also have these wholesale packages of things that are other portions of the realm too.

So it almost feels to me like m- modern local media companies have to have two hats in their sort of arsenal. One is that direct sales hat, which is what we've done historically and really well. This is like you get... This is the place to go. This is our retail shed, if you will. And a wholesale kind of thing for others that want to take some of that inventory and package it up in their own retail sale kind of opportunity.

So it's a more B2B kind of dynamic than it is the direct sales thing. So it's interesting- ... though, you wonder operationally if these companies can evolve to truly be that harmonic with all these other inventory sources. 

Jim Wilson: Yeah, exactly. 

Tim Hanlon: All right. Let me ask you, let me ask you a couple of quickies on the CBS thing, right?

And I, and we've talked, a lot of people have talked about the Stephen Colbert thing, show going away, the time buy that, that Byron Allen is now doing and hoping he can make up the m- the difference on, on ad sales with a, shall we say, decidedly less than product. And the CBS Radio News thing, an almost 100-year-old tradition going away as well.

A lot of ink has been spilled and digital bits and bytes spread across the interwebs on this. But I wanna ask you from a local perspective. My personal thought is, I wanna get your opinion on as we sort of segue here, I worry about the local CBS either owned and operated station or affiliated station in the television realm, or the, in the radio side stations that carried the CBS network programming for news.

Do you think that the local entities will suffer because of that dissipation or erasure of that network source of content that in those local places people relied on? And now that they're not there anymore, do you think that the local entity takes a hit in some respects in terms of prestige, et cetera?

Jim Wilson: Yeah, I think, look, I-- and we might have even talked about it on one of our prior discussions. I think at the end of the day, people are attracted to quality content. And, I guess the question is, what is replacing late night? Is it something that's compelling, something that will draw greater, more eyeballs than before?

Was late night unprofitable? That's what they say, so I'm gonna believe them if they say that it's unprofitable. If it's unprofitable and every company is-- has a set of investors that are looking for profitability... look, look, we've witnessed through history, institutions that just end up going away because with the passage of time, the institution is really no longer viable.

The audience has gone away. And so it is what it is. We've seen all these platforms that have launched through all these years, and they go away, and we all get a little nostalgic about late night and all these big brands that have been in our lives forever. But at some point, the eyeballs are so fragmented in this world now, and they're going to streaming, and they're going online, and they're going to social platforms.

There's so many different ways to view content now. And so the eyeballs, which we all know have been decreasing on linear for quite some time, not dramatically, but they've been drifting. So I guess the question is, did those shows make money? Yes. No. If they didn't, unless there's a real strategic reason to keep them, and I think the smart people who run those companies are making decisions around what is best for that company.

Now the question is, what goes in its place? And will that, will ... These businesses are being run on profit. Is this ultimately whatever slots in there, is that gonna create greater profits and greater cash flow for these companies? That's how ... And like we all wanna get caught up in art and entertainment, and I do too.

I'm watching great shows and great news. I listen to three news podcasts every morning. That's where I largely get my news. And so I don't really read news any longer. I listen to the news. I don't even watch the news unless there's something significant going on. Our lives are changing so much in how we consume things. I've always been a big radio listener and now podcast listener, and there, I always have an affection toward radio and audio in general. But back to Colbert, its people are making decisions based upon profitability and cash flow and what I hope is the survival of the medium that they're in, right?

And, or the shifting of that medium into digital, which is more likely the case. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, I get to wrap up. I guess this is the, I guess the point I'm get- getting at is that, if I'm an affiliated station of CBS, right? And my, one of my programming blocks, goes away, my late local news may have a little bit less value in that there probably won't be people tuning in for a few minutes to watch the end of it to watch whatever late night show is coming on.

The affiliation business may be the beginning of the end of the affiliate model, right? Because, you go to these smaller local stations that are owned and operated by third parties, i.e. not the networks themselves, they take great pride. They still brand themselves as CBS 57 or ABC 9 or whatever it is, right.

So that branding is really important, and when you take away an all-day part from that brand, that's a challenge. Same for all news stations, right? Who carried CBS News at the top of the hour and depended on them for breaking news and interstitial programming content, right? A lot of them took great pride in having the CBS name affixed to their news broadcasts, and now they gotta scramble to fill in what's not there anymore.

So an argument could be made. 

Jim Wilson: So the question is, yeah, are they gonna fill it in with have the benefit of sitting on the board of Odyssey, and it's got an incredible leadership team that, grappled with the CBS News change, right? And I won't go into anything more than that, but, I think that company is producing incredible content on its own, sports content, news content, and partnering with all different types of companies that are bringing content.

Because I think ultimately, again, we've talked about it, broadcasters are becoming local media companies, they're becoming content creators, content publishers, and there is gonna be a lesser reliance on these affiliate models because those affiliates are themselves NBC to Peacock, ABC to Disney and Hulu and, and so on, CSN to Paramount Plus.

They're all making shifts into digital, and so the question is will those other brands be around? Will those affiliate... Who are you making content for first, Peacock or NBC? And so all of that is transitioning, and I think any of those companies that have been relying on those affiliates have been looking at how they create their own content for local markets, and that in of itself creates an incredible new opportunity for them to create value.

Tim Hanlon: Leave it there for the time being. Jim will be back on an irregular basis, probably every couple of weeks or so. And in between, we're gonna try to intersperse with a whole variety of guests from in and around the local media landscape. And hopefully you'll be entertained to no end with our various conjectures and deeper dives into various topics that are befuddling and bemusing us all in the local media space.

My thanks, of course, to the great team at TVREV. They know who they are, but you might not. Melissa Hourigan, Jessika Walsten, Mike Gasbara, who's back from paternity leave. Congratulations to him. And of course, the Grand Poobah of TVREV and Fabric Media, the owner of TVREV, Jason Damata.

Our thanks, of course, as well to the Madhive team in particular Stephanie Nerby and Nicole Lewis, and yes, of course, Jim Wilson, and the inimitable Jerry Payne, whose audio excellence again this week helps us get on the air. We appreciate your listening. See you next week when you will return hopefully to In The Vicinity.