Local TV’s Next Act: From Frankenstack To Full-Funnel

At this year’s NAB Show, the mood around local media wasn’t panic—it was progress. In Episode 7 of In the Vicinity, local media veterans Tim Hanlon and Jim Wilson unpack an industry that knows exactly what needs fixing—and is finally starting to align around how to do it.

From the “Frankenstack” of disconnected ad tech to the ongoing challenge of training sales teams to confidently sell omnichannel, the conversation zeroes in on a critical truth: the future of local media won’t be defined by platforms—it will be defined by people, process, and content.

The question isn’t whether local TV evolves. It’s whether it can evolve fast enough to connect the dots.

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

Tim Hanlon: Hello there everybody. How's it going? My name is Tim Hanlon, founder and CEO of the Vertere Group here in Chicago, where we consultatively advise all kinds of companies in the media and advertising and marketing landscapes. As they try to figure out what the hell is going on out there and how do we survive going forward in the future here and reporting for duty this week here In the Vicinity.

Thanks for joining me and my pal and colleague, Jim Wilson. He is the CEO of Madhive and Board Director of GSTV and Audacy, a very busy guy just back from the NAB show. I did not go this year, but I've gone for at least 20 some odd years. Jim was there, and we're gonna start off our conversation this week with a little bit of a quick sort of overview of his impressions about the conversations going on there.

Mostly positive, but obviously have some, with some levels of concern. We're gonna grapple with some of the local sales issues discussed, as well as some thoughts about how better or worse or somewhere in between that process has become or is becoming given all the Sturm und Drang that's going on in the space of media.

And we'll also get a little preview from Jim on his future exploits. Actually not the future as we drop this though, he is right in the midst of the POSSIBLE extravaganza down there in Miami Beach, et cetera. Fun-filled, packed, adventurous conversation coming at you here In the Vicinity right now.

Please, as always, enjoy.

Let's get a little bit of a sense of what you learned that you didn't know before going to NAB this year, and maybe a little bit of a sense of maybe what the dynamics were, what the mood was, what the vibes were for those who didn't go or need to know.

Jim Wilson: I thought the mood was pretty upbeat. I spent time with a number of the senior NAB leaders and despite some of the news and about consolidation or not happening in the market. I think generally there seems to be a sense of, everyone seemed upbeat. Look, we're in a political year. Broadcasters are thinking about how they're acting upon how they're growing their digital businesses and linear is still strong.

It's still a focus, right? It's a big focus. They're growing digital in their political year. So it was pretty upbeat.

Tim Hanlon: Cyclicality is playing its role again, as it normally does, holding on until the big influx of political money and stuff and, we can talk about the problems after we're done with that.

Jim Wilson: Again, I think there's also just a general sense of wanting to work together to solve some of it, the linear automation project going on with the TVB. And working through that and then figuring out ways to, as an industry to come together. And I think that there's a general comradery around that and I think that alone creates a sense of optimism.

Tim Hanlon: Let's talk about the sales function. We've nibbled around it in previous conversations, but maybe you can frame the show and your conversations both on the record and off the record from the ad sales and revenue generation perspective. Because I've been to NAB shows for time in memoriam, right? And constantly, it's always oh, finally this platform's gonna enable us to put digital and linear and now CTV all together. And what's the mood of salespeople and the sales function from your perspective, both in your day-to-day, but also at NAB are we getting any closer to making this process of at least the sales of advertising easier for all these different touchpoints now that quote unquote, broadcasters are involved in.

Jim Wilson: The big overarching theme initiative tactic even in 2026 is please help us train our teams in the field so that they can learn how to sell omnichannel campaigns and feel confident about doing it and give us tools for them to use so that they can confidently do it. And that's it. Reduce the amount of time that they are doing administrative work, reduce the number of questions that they're unable to answer. And as a company, one that is working across all of these broadcasters, we said to ourselves, “We're gonna make it incumbent upon us to be a part of that process, to work with our clients, to roll out training programs and to work with them and to up level their sales teams.”

And I've said this before, I want the role of a local seller to be a really exciting job for people when they come out of school or at any point in their career. I want local sales and that connection with the local community. It's critical to the future of local media. I don't think it goes away.

People will talk about self-serve, but I think self-serve is an access point, but I think the local sale will always be consultative or have a consultative component to it.

Tim Hanlon: The points of the sales process, the sort of the different sort of functional or sub-functions, if you will, of that process.

Where does the solution best evolve from, right? Is it the trafficking thing? Is it the inventory management thing? Is it the CRM thing? Is it other things? And frankly, wouldn't all those points and others kind of wanna build the all things for all people thing anyway? For the pieces that they don't have?

Isn't there a little bit of an M&A points solution? I guess what I'm trying to get at is like everybody seems to want to leverage their key functional expertise and get into the other places too, if you will bring it all together. The problem is you've got three or four different starting points that kind of all wanna bring it together and it just winds up still collapsing.

So what do you think and where has the most credibility, if you will, enforcing and maybe defining how to streamline all this stuff most effectively and quickly?

Jim Wilson: Again, let me just go back and step back. I believe the role of the broadcaster is content creation and community development, and that's the competitive advantage for these companies.

And so they are all working with what we call at Madhive, the Frankenstack, meaning they're all working with various point solutions that don't talk to each other. The good news is there are easier ways now using AI and APIs, of course, to connect all of these systems, to have them talk to each other so that ultimately we live in a world where a seller is in the field.

They have a screen in their hand, they are working with a client. They have an AI driven proposal platform that's pulling in all types of interesting information about that client to create a proposal. That proposal hits send. That send goes right through the system and can be optimized through AI by the way.

And so really that's what we're hoping to get to is a streamlined connected system where you've got maybe two front ends. One is a front end from a seller and then a front end from a planner. And if we can have those two and then have everything else connected that's where it needs to go. And that's what I know we're trying to achieve.

Tim Hanlon: How far along is that process, would you say, and what are the logistical hairballs that are still probably the most difficult to handle or deal with or smooth out?

Jim Wilson: Some of the point solutions that are out there that need to develop their own APIs and have the willingness to invest so that their solutions can be plugged into a streamlined system.

Those who don't do that will be left out and believe it or not, there are just some that seem to be holdouts or they're taking longer than others, but I think everyone ultimately needs to get on board with that and find ways to have their systems talk to other systems.

Tim Hanlon: Is that though hobbled by the tyranny still of the linear sell?

Because to a semi outsider like myself, meaning I've not been in the sales role, that's not my functional expertise, nor have I been in the trenches of selling local television centric or television influenced advertising before. So that easy button of what? Linear plus digital plus now CTV?

It still doesn't exist yet.

Jim Wilson: No I think that still today, there's the comfortability of linear, especially in a political year, that digital is good enough when digital should be more than good enough at this point, and they need to multitask.

Multitasking is running your linear business in a political year and simultaneously growing your digital business. And again, I go back to should broadcasters be building out their own digital content? Of course they should be, right? They are the content producers of the future for local.

They are now, but I think that they realize that they've gotta create more content than they did before, because as we've spoken before, there is less programming coming from the affiliates. And so there's more airtime that needs to be filled. And I think that's great actually, because it can become local centric programming.

Tim Hanlon: So as we've said many times before, you've got a unique perch in that not only are you helming Madhive largely in the CTV realm, but you're also on the boards of two other companies in and around sort of local media. One sort of being place-based, if you will, on the GSTV side of things.

It's a version of place-based and on the Audacy side of things, the radio and audio space. At what point do those touch points come into the mix and become truly omnichannels, for example? As I know we saw conversations around out-of-home and digital out-of-home. There's not a day that goes by in my feeds that I don't see my friend Barry Fry talking about how great out-of-home is. And all the extensions of such. For years I remember various folks talking strategically about wouldn't it be interesting? And some companies had this for a brief moment, right?

Where they had that inventory as well. And not adjacent inventory, but actually ownership, like a clear channel, for example. At what point though, do we start to maybe. Bring all of those things together, not just the broadcast splinters of digital and streaming, but also the place-based stuff and the digital out-of-home stuff, and maybe even audio stuff where either collaboratively or m and a ultimately, these truly become omni-channel local processes for marketers to comprehensively hit and scale and target.

Jim Wilson: Media mix modeling has been around for a while, right? Most agencies and planners are using media mix modeling. The question is, how informed are those media mix models and how can information that is pulled in from the proper utilization of AI bring more intelligence to the planning process? And if the AI portion and the intelligence that's brought in from previous campaigns and all the learnings there and the fact that we live in a dynamic world, what we should be able to do is kick out intelligent proposals that automatically tell you that if you are going to run this campaign and you want to achieve these outcomes or to achieve the maximum outcome or whatever goal you're setting, these are the channels and the tactics that you should be using? And for certain types of clients, digital out-of-home should definitely be there.

Think about the categories that thrive in digital out-of-home. Location-based businesses, legal, healthcare, et cetera, customer journeys, dwell experiences, all these types of things should really be considered. And I'm a huge fan of digital out-of-home. And shout out to Barry for being somewhat at the helm of that.

And I think that digital out-of-home is having a moment. That's going to be a long moment. It's getting more closely tied into the whole planning process just because of the digital nature of it, as opposed to, as I always say over in the corner, that out-of-home team that is planning. When someone says, “Hey, we got an extra $500,000, why don't we kick it over to out-of-home?”

And that's honestly how I've seen it done in the past and what we need is intelligent planning and it will kick out plans that have CTV display audio digital out-of-home sequenced accordingly. And you can toggle them and look at the estimated reach and frequency and outcome that you would get by playing around with the tactics.

Tim Hanlon: I guess my point is that planning is probably a relatively quicker path to that. A ping and a ring and equating those things than the buying or the selling part of it. Because while we can plan for multimedia, we can't really buy it unless there's an exception or a company happens to be also involved in, right?

So it becomes, the silos still exist, right? So conceptually I don't know where a piece of video on a gas station pump or near a retail convenience environment starts and a quote unquote CTV ad stops, right? Because you could make the argument that both are going for that quote unquote budget.

Arguably it's artificially defined because that's how we got here. The TV people lay claim to it. The at-home or the digital at-home, people lay claim to it. The digital people lay claim to it. This is, whereas at the end of the day, it’s like video. So planning, I worry less about the planning part of it because I think it's relatively straightforward and easy to put those pieces together and make the numbers work and the process look clean. But it's always been historically, and I think even more complexly now, if that's a word, to affect that in a sales manner. To deliver that or to certainly to buy that more harmonically.

And to me that feels like there's more opportunity. To AI and API the way into those environments. And maybe not owning all of those pieces, but having a GSTV more plug and play with, say, a radio slash audio schedule and or a television and streaming video schedule, and that could be shared revenue or whatever, right?

To me, that feels a lot more holistic and an easy button to a marketer than having to stop at each silo and buy them separately.

Jim Wilson: Omnichannel DSPs help with all of that. And also, again, there are even tools out there that basically can automate direct buying if you wanna do direct buying and can look at the connection between one tactic and another tactic.

So when you say, where does CTV begin and how does that lead to GSTV? You're gonna look at the reach and frequency and the outcome that you would get. If you use those two tactics, what's the estimated outcome that you would get? And then you measure it on the other side. And so connecting APIs on the channel, AI, all of this is making this so much easier.

It's our day-to-day world with our broadcast partners and with our other agency clients to pull all these tactics together. You don't have to own them. Now look, some of them can make sense to combine. Like some people think that, “oh, let's just combine all the digital place-based companies into one company.”

That is an idea. Then there's another idea, which is that each one of these digital place-based companies exist within a vertical, and maybe it is better if it is combined with another business or tactic in that vertical. And so all that is exciting stuff for us for the future.

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, and this is the irony because I think in many respects the local broadcast television touchpoint is probably the least changed or the last entity standing that hasn't been holed out or dramatically bulldozed like a Yellow Pages. We don't even talk about those anymore. Newspapers. What are those generally, but, radio and some of these others.

And the brands of these local TV properties, especially their news expressions are still strongly known and have legacy value. To me that feels like the irony because if any entity from a branding and hall pass perspective is given a pass, if you will, to be the umbrella branding for all of these functions, maybe M and A or harmonized, it's local broadcasting.

The problem of course though, and we talked about this before, but is that the mindset? Broadcasters are broadcasting, which is great. That's the skillset that's historically, but more aggressively, recognizing that there need to be many more things in an omnichannel manner to be a more local marketing solution in all capital letters, not just one format of such are maybe capable of getting there. That place. But I'm not sure others are when we're talking M and A and trying to scale the broadcast part, that's not, you tell me if that's gonna ever happen.

Jim Wilson: I know the broadcasters have looked at acquiring adjacent channels, and that's interesting and that could be a strategy.

There's been a lot of M and A in the broadcast side. Networks have been acquired by broadcasters and other streaming services have been bought by broadcasters. But all that comes down, to me, is everything comes back to content. How much content are you creating? What content do you own?

How do you monetize it as broadly as you can with a focus on local communities? And then how many channels if you are creating that content for TV digital outlets. Audio outlets, any type of outlet that content can get distribution. You could have the local news. The weather report running on a gas station pump.

You could have something, I don't know, local sports on, an atmosphere screen in a gym. There's so many opportunities. And I've been around. My first job was at Disney. My second job was at Universal. Content was always king and content will always be king.

And I even had this conversation earlier today with a group of other people around the future of the media companies and the big media companies. When you've got companies, other content companies out there. Anybody can create content. Whether you're a large consolidated company or a smaller entity.

I think my point is that content means everything, and I think it all comes down to what you're creating and how you monetize it.

Tim Hanlon: Alright, last question. And on the monetization front, most specifically sales, do you think it's getting easier or harder to sell local content, local adjacencies, local media, given the state that we're in and the flux that we're in? Is there an argument for both?

Jim Wilson: No, I'm gonna say easier. I think local content is more relatable and more trusted. We know it's more trusted because polls show that. Now, of course, polls are polls these days, but I think it makes sense. Local content is trusted. Local personalities are trusted. And trust can easily be lost too, by the way.

But I think it's trusted content and it's relatable content. Tell me about my community. Help me navigate around my community. Help me get to know more about where I live. I think that is extremely relatable and consumable content.

Tim Hanlon: Alright. As we record this, we're gonna be dropping this in the midst of what is now seemingly the antidote to Cannes with POSSIBLE in the Miami Beach area.

What are you looking for there? It's a different crowd than NAB for sure. Anything that you're looking to achieve specifically by being there? It's certainly a CMO spotlight environment for sure.

Jim Wilson: It's very different from NAB. I call POSSIBLE pre-Cannes planning.

This show is getting bigger and bigger every year, getting more and more effective. And, it is a showcase for CMOs. It's a showcase for agencies, and it's a showcase for tech companies all to come together and talk about how they're bringing it all together. And that's what I'm planning on doing.

I'm actually doing an AI and media panel while I'm there and those are the types of conversations that are happening and I think it's gonna be interesting. And what's so great about POSSIBLE is, like any conferences and Cannes is the same way, so much gets accomplished just by randomly bumping into people.

Tim Hanlon: Alright, that's a wrap for this week. Thank you for listening. We appreciate it. Let us know how you're enjoying the content, of course. And my friends at tvrev.com is the place to check in with all kinds of great opinions and conversational stuff about what's going on in the media space, including yours truly’s weekly column for Proximity, the section there that's devoted to various issues in and around local media. We have a lot of fun putting that together for you as well. If you're not subscribed to getting the email of that each week or not checking that out at the website, make sure you try to do that. And my thanks of course, especially to Melissa Hourigan and Jason Damata this week for their help in putting these pieces together.

And the great Jerry Payne of course for his audio excellence and appreciate your listening. We'll see you next week here In the Vicinity.