National Vs. Local Is Breaking: How Streaming And Broadcast Are Rewriting The Map

What does “local” even mean anymore?

In this episode of In the Vicinity, local media veterans Tim Hanlon and Jim Wilson take on one of the most fundamental — and increasingly outdated — constructs in media: the divide between national and local advertising.

For decades, broadcasters have operated with a top-down model built around DMAs — delivering unmatched scale but limited precision. Meanwhile, streamers have taken the opposite approach, starting with zip codes and building upward — offering surgical targeting but still chasing true scale. Now, those two worlds are colliding.

The result? A redefinition of local that’s less about geography and more about flexibility, data, and outcomes.

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

Tim Hanlon: Alright, let's do this. How are you everybody? My name is Tim Hanlon. I am the founder and the CEO of the Vertere Group here in Chicago, where we advisorily and consultatively help various companies in the media and technology. And advertising spaces, trying to figure out what the heck is going on in this crazy mixed up world that is now media.

Thank you for joining us here In the Vicinity. As we pick up our little weekly cadence into all things local media with my colleague and pal Jim Wilson. He's the CEO of Madhive, as well as a board director for Audacy, the radio slash audio company and GSTV, the place-based ad company in all places such as gas stations and convenience stores and the like.

And we try to get to you each and every week with some interesting topics of note of interest, of import in and around that of local media. And we're all struggling and fuming our way through what the changing dynamics might mean to the local media space and we're gonna stick with local television again this week, and we're gonna delve into something we've been nibbling around the edges of for some time.

And that's this distinction, a more definitional kind of understanding of what is quote unquote national and what is quote unquote local in a world where local broadcasters are really good at scaling messaging for advertisers in DMA constructs in a reach kind of mindset.

Reach the entirety of a designated marketing area, but struggle frankly, with trying to more granularly break those down into sub DMA parts zip codes and zip plus fours and other demarcations perhaps like cable has done over the years. Simply because they own the entirety of their broadcast signal.

And the infrastructure, at least in linear, doesn't really exist to allow for that breaking down into smaller subsets and juxtaposing that with what streamers are capable of doing, especially the national, premium subscription oriented streamers that have had support. Where frankly the entire nation can be brought into a spreadsheet of zip codes and zip plus four clusters, right?

And working their way up from those into whatever scale or even national footprint that they might need. So we're really talking about two different historical starting points about how each can reinvent, rethink, potentially even partner with, dare I say, into newer realities of what quote unquote local advertising delivery looks like.

And we'll get into some of the nooks and crannies of that stuff. And pretty interesting stuff that we have to chat about as well as we're gonna topically go into a column that I wrote last week. He says somewhat selfishly in TVREV for the Proximity section of said site tvrev.com.

Check it out. And it's really kind of a questioning of CBS's move to officially and fully exit the late night day part by seeding the one last hour of late night that existed on the CBS schedule. That being the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which will be ending sometime in May. And this comes on the heels of the cancellation and the outsourcing of the hour that followed it called The Late Late Show with James Corden. And as you may know that hour as well as now the next late show hour to come will both now be programmed by Allen Media Group with two of their syndicated shows, which will be double run and some of which will have repeats from years ago and that kind of stuff.

Essentially a time-buy by Allen Media to fill in that two hour window that CBS essentially will no longer program. And we're gonna get into some of the effects of that. What that means to the, if you will, the prestige or the value of CBS as a network now that they're basically exiting a formally monetizable and wonderfully so day part.

What is it gonna mean for owned and operated stations coming out of their late news? Probably some immediate improvement to their margins. But what are people being led into from their late local news now? And frankly also, and most specifically. And most urgently, the affiliates who frankly rely on a network like CBS to essentially bring a halo of value to their station beyond their local news, right?

That network, in this case, CBS, is the local place to get CBS programming, and now it will be. Bereft now of at least two hours of such that people have for at least the last 30 years or so since David Letterman came over, Merv Griffin back in the late sixties too, et cetera. The CBS late movie got at least used to having some programming on from a national perspective, no longer now going to be the case.

Anyway, we're gonna shake all that stuff up and bring that to you now. And please as always, enjoy. And here we go.

Jim, I thought one of the issues we might want to nibble around this week on is something that I think has been part of our conversations, or at least hinted at previously that's endemic to I think this struggle that linear broadcasters and the streaming giants are amidst, when it comes to advertising sales, and this is this notion of what's quote unquote national in a world where there's so many capabilities, especially in streaming, to break things apart into sub DMA and zip code kind of structures and stuff.

Isn't this kinda like Venus and Mars, two different approaches to doing local now that streamers are scaled and don't have this, I don't know, preconceived notion of what an artificial construct of a DMA is, whereas local broadcasters have been effectively living and using that as their targeting devices?

Jim Wilson: Yeah. Obviously over-the-air, our broadcasters, it's traditional broadcast is gonna launch creatives within the DMA. And that's how advertising gets done. In a streaming world, being able to, in the DMA of Washington DC run a McDonald's ad in the morning to reinforce breakfast in Northern Virginia, but to run an ad for lunch in Bethesda, that's completely viable and has been viable for years now.

And one wonders how dollars will shift toward really thinking about the fact that we are a country that is a collection of zip codes and demographics and that we want to make sure that we're maximizing the advertising opportunity to our audiences. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah. Let's think about this from both of these perspectives, because I think this is helpful for those who are on one side or the other and they don't necessarily see that other side, right?

So on the broadcast television side it's taken about 30 years of cable to push this notion to broadcasters that the DMA, which has been, I don't know, the cozy, warm covering of their differentiation, if you will, in the local marketplace. Where else can you broadly reach and more efficiently reach a set of people in a market, in a marketplace?

Then through the DMA construct that allows broadcasters to reach all of those people, right? Yet cable 30 years ago invented this idea of being able to do, where available, the ability to sub DMA target maybe by different other things, maybe by cable head and or other things. But there's gotta be some value still to that for broadcasters, right?

Because that's always been the advantage and the opportunity to enable sub DMA targeting back when The Cable Act was agreed to back in the early to mid-nineties, right? There was a reason why broadcasters wanted their whole signal to be completely preserved so that they could monetize that whole signal.

Jim Wilson: That's reach, that is reach, that's top of the funnel and getting the message out broadly and efficiently is what broadcast does. Other channels do it, radio does it. Even billboards do it. You can get messages out broadly and hit the top of the funnel, but brand marketers are probably looking at how they hit the top of the funnel and then how they move down the funnel.

And at the end of the day, everyone is looking for performance. And am I converting customers? Am I delivering outcomes? And I guess you can use both, right? And I think that's what they're doing, right? Nissan is running national ads, perhaps launching a new automobile, but they're running local ads with local promotions around specific automobiles.

We've worked with some car companies, driving market share gains on six nameplates in Southern California. And that's very different from the goals that they have in New England. That is more of the norm for sure. To me, local will continue to grow or the concept of local will continue to grow.

And in our business, national versus regional and local, the national business is probably, I think somewhere around a quarter of what regional, local is. And we have the capabilities to deliver messages targeted to specific audiences or creative, targeted to specific audiences in geographies to maximize the outcome in the geography.

And now we've got AI that can actually, if done correctly, could help with the creative process to make the creative process more efficient so that you can deliver. Those creators more quickly. 

Tim Hanlon: Okay, so I guess the other question embedded there, and then I wanna get to the streaming first thing, and then maybe I'll get to some of those technologies and stuff that you're hinting at from the streaming perspective.

It's a completely different perspective, right? Because broadcasters are basically, “Hey, we've got the whole DMA and we have the whole signal and we can reach, we excel at reach, right?” But where we need to get better and embedded in is things that are more finite. Call that a sub DMA, call that state boundaries, call those congressional district geographies, zip code or zip plus four builds of such. That's the inverse of where streamers come into play. The most national of streamers essentially can start tackling, and I would argue probably haven't really come close to perfecting yet, but they're just beginning with that zip code mindset.

Aside from data centric targeting and those kinds of things, psychographic and all that stuff. I'm talking mostly from a geographical kind of dynamic. It's really not all that difficult to start breaking the country out into zips and zip plus fours where possible, and at least start that quote unquote, local journey in competition with broadcasters who are doing it in the opposite direction.

But, I don't know. I don't think it's been all that successful thus far. There's probably something in there that's been market Grok. 

Jim Wilson: Local is largely on the radar of streamers that have evolved out of broadcasters. So the Peacocks of the world, the Paramounts of the world, because of CBS, they really get it.

There are some streamers that we at Madhive have spoken to about bringing local dollars to them, which is completely incremental to what they have. And their answer is not yet. We have enough national business to hold us over for a while. And we're like think about it, you're not a hundred percent filled and we can actually increase your fill.

Remember when I started Premion years ago, it was about bringing new products to local advertisers. And so one of those use cases is Jim's Pizza in Santa Clara, California can't afford to buy an entire DMA on television, but they could buy the zip codes where their customers are most likely to come from, and they can now run video ads more efficiently targeted to a specific geography, and that's where streaming really comes in. And so there's that use case and that's something that Madhive's tech has been solving. And then there is the use case, which I talked about earlier, is the tailored national ad for the local geography to either reinforce an automobile type or some other service within that market. 

Tim Hanlon: Look, think about this. Because the advent of streaming and local streams that stations have available to them and stuff, frankly brings this into stark relief. I think the question that I grapple with most is if this is the new reality of local, right? And now we've got the ability to stream our way into local as much as we can do in the traditional broadcast downstream sense, which is the harder process to do, right? To take the DMA broadcast model and get it to a point where you can sub DMA digitize and stuff, right? Broadcasters from a technical perspective can't really do that in linear. They can now, at least in the beginning days, in streaming. Or is it harder for, let's call them national streamers, who are starting with spreadsheets of zips and zip plus fours to build their way up, right? And to create as national a footprint as they might want, but from the ground up.

So there are two different dynamics. One is taking the limitations of DMAs and figuring out how to get more granular. Whereas the streamers are already granular in their capabilities, but need to figure out ways to aggregate themselves upward, if you will, to things approximating that local reach that broadcasters have had.

I guess the question is there a better pathway or do they ultimately harmonize in the middle somehow?

Jim Wilson: It'd be nice if they harmonized in the middle. I think more of a digital first person, so I think the ability to, for a streamer, there are platforms out there that you know that streamers can use and that the streamers depend on to deliver and reach local audiences with their content or advertisers through their content.

And so it already exists. You can build up a DMA on a streamer faster than you can break down a broadcaster linear feed, even though there are some initiatives out there being led around automated linear, which are, frankly exciting, that they would even come to fruition because ultimately that's where you meet in the middle, right? You have automated linear feed, married with a digital feed through either their streaming content or other streaming content. And what I think is gonna be beautiful is that day when, again, I'm a big, as I've said on here before, what I'm really anxious to see is broadcasters creating more digital content and building out, because broadcasters are, in my mind, becoming publishers and streamers on their own. So therefore, as they create their own content, they'll have their over-the-air version and then they'll have their digital version. And now with the digital versions, they could have a number of different content broken down for sub-segments within a DMA.

And so again, it's just getting the broadcasters to focus on that. And some, as I said before, are ahead on creating digital content than others. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, look, and I think there's also a short term and a long term kind of dynamic to that, right? In the short term most every local station or group or broadcaster most especially the network affiliates, some independents have their own digital stream for their channel. Right now, it's not a complete replication because there are network issues and syndication issues, those rights and stuff, but for at least for news for sure, the many hours of news those are essentially simulcast. So what you just described is to a small extent available today for experimentation and proving of that, right? Where probably the majority is the over-the-air DMA scale thing, reach thing. Whereas those watching in that stream environment can be subject to all this sub DMA and zip code and otherwise targeting, longer term, we never know how long this term is. A TSC 3.0 could be that too, because ultimately that's what, we're taking an IP kind of dynamic and applying it to broadcast. So what might have been. Doable in the nineties with the cable act where those ad units could be broken up and through the pipe benefit of the cable operator be able to do the sub DMA we, the broadcasters, may for the very first time be able to do that for their over-the-air delivery as well, that addressability. 

So it is exciting. The problem is that's gonna take a little bit more time, I think, versus some of these streamers getting their resources together to build out the mother of all zip code spreadsheets to build their way up.

Jim Wilson: That technology pretty much exists and the question is, do they each build their own or do they rely on content companies or technology companies? It gets confusing these days. So broadcasters are becoming content companies and are they technology companies? Are they broadcast companies right now?

They need to really focus on content and, continuing to focus on their competitive advantages, their strength within communities. And that's where I keep repeating the same message over and over again. That's my point of view. It could be different for others. 

Tim Hanlon: Alright, so let me ask you one last question on this topic. Because I think it's gonna be very interesting. Jump ball and then some between the two different entities to truly redefine a better local than what the two of them are. Starting with, what's your thought about both day-to-day with Madhive and other things that you might be talking about? An idea that I call bespoke geographies.

Where, if literally you are creating a country that is a pile of zip codes, there's plus fours, right? That should be a much more, I don't know, fertile ground or opportunistic scenario for us, let's say a multi-city retailer, right? Who maybe has stores in big DMAs and maybe in c and d counties that are outside of, or at the fringes of DMAs.

The whole idea of a DMA is it's not even worth trying to reconstruct that when you could tell, let's say, a Home Depot or a Lowe's, “Hey, give us your 472 locations and we'll build your own bespoke national network that's directly related to, say, stores that are within 10, 15 miles of your locations.

That to me feels amazingly transformative if broadcasters can get outta their DMA model and streamers can get out of their, if you will, national model. 

Jim Wilson: But we do that every day. We basically take in any location based business whether it's a single location or 400 locations, and then we work with the client to figure out the geography that surrounds the location.

And then we figure out the types of audiences that we're targeting within that geography and that exists now. And clients love it. It's so efficient for them. And now with the scale of CTV and the ability to retarget onto other platforms, it really creates a top of the funnel, a full funnel experience and really gets focused on delivering outcomes.

And you start bringing in data around conversions, you've got a really efficient model. So not to say that a full DMA reach broadcast model isn't still really valuable because it is, it's just that marketers are going to use different tactics based upon what they're trying to accomplish with that specific brand or that specific business.

Tim Hanlon: All right. We can probably have another conversation at some point about political advertising as we get closer to the midterms this year. That's really ramping up. We're all waiting for that, wink, nod. 

Jim Wilson: We’re not waiting. It's happening. 

Tim Hanlon: I know, regardless, I mean that that's always been the incongruence play out, because especially with congressional races or mayoral races or whatever those are, you know much more. There's always been the 890spillage, if you will, of a DMA buy, in the New York metropolitan area. You're running for site, you're running for the New Jersey gubernatorial run and it doesn't matter. WNBC is still gonna put out there in Long Island and Connecticut and Westchester and all that stuff, right? But you take the waste as just part of the doing business because it's gonna ensure at least the reach is also gonna hit New Jersey.

But we all know, and I think political advertisers probably know this better, that there's also something to be said, maybe even more so about being able to be more efficient and specific and targeted in a way that doesn't have waste in that regard. So I guess the thing that excites me most on the political front as well as others, is taking that blunt instrument of a DMA broadcaster and sharpening it further to the extent that it's technically possible, and from a streamer's perspective to how do you sand down some of these sharp shards into something that approximates or maybe is a better, a more nimble way to do the quote unquote DMA thing anew. 

Jim Wilson: Yeah. In traditional broadcasting, you're right, there is DMA wide and maybe some spillage in the streaming business. We're in the business of making sure that we are targeting exactly where that political advertiser wants to target, enter the exact audience. We were recently given a data file from one of the political agencies that had IP addresses that fell outside of the actual area that they were trying to target. And so we had to make sure that they knew that if we targeted that we would be outside, they may not be voters, right? So you gotta have that dialogue, and it's a high stakes business. It really is. In terms of every brand, every advertiser deserves to have a great ad experience in delivering impressions to the right audience, in the right market, at the right time, at the right message.

There's nothing more high stakes than doing that for a political candidate who's trying to sway a vote inside of a county and or make sure that people are getting to the polls in certain parts of a state or a county or a town. And so it's, I have to say, political advertising is exciting. It's tough, but it's exciting.

And for any platform that's in that space, it only makes you better. And so when I was running Premion and going through the cycle, nothing made our platform at the time. It really upped the game for local targeting. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, I've always said that if you can figure out political, you basically have figured out the rest of local, right?

That’s the future of local, because it's everything that we've just talked about. Concentrated, specific zip plus four meets, DMA meets all kinds of that stuff. Maybe we'll have a guest on in a future episode to talk about political as well because it's well worth delving into because I think it's a roadmap I think for all things future. 

Alright. So there's so much stuff in the news. We could talk about the Nexstar TEGNA thing as we record this. The district judge in California is essentially extending the stay of this merger and stuff. I think there's more to come.

We can talk about that a little bit later. But I did want to, I call out maybe somewhat self servingly, a column I did this week for TVREV I talked about the exit effectively, the end of CBS being in the late night day part already being nibbled away at by the 1230 Eastern Hour going away when James Cordon left the late show.

But now Stephen Colbert, a date has been given to him in May. CBS has announced that they are going to take not only the 1230 hour and give it to much less expensive syndicated programming from Allen Media Group, but also for the 1130 hour as well. So effectively, CBS is now going to be getting out of the original production of content business for late night and essentially renting it out to Byron Allen's team for two hours each evening of a syndicated fare. What are your initial thoughts of that? Mine is I'm not sure CBS benefits. I'm not sure the local affiliates benefit, and I'm not sure even the O&Os are gonna benefit from that, aside from maybe some short term higher margins because they don't have to put a lot of sales effort against that inventory anymore.

Jim Wilson: Yeah, I mean it's something that I know broadcasters have talked about for a long time in terms of the reduction of the number of hours of programming that are coming from the affiliates. And now, even the concept that, and again, I don't know what the level of quality of this syndicated content would be, but to the extent that it's not the same quality as late night as it's perceived or any other content that comes from any content producer, to be honest with you, is only gonna devalue that broadcast experience. And advertisers want to advertise in shows. They wanna be in shows. So even in the streaming business, they don't want to just be on a streaming platform. They don't wanna just be on a channel. They want to be on a show within a channel, on a streaming platform.

And so the effects on the broadcasters, it comes back to, then it puts more responsibility on the broadcasters to go out there and create high quality content that will drive advertising in their markets. And so that's a super interesting development. But not surprising. 

Tim Hanlon: What I don't know though and as yet to be really determined, I think is do the affiliates forget the O&Os for a second of CBS because they have no choice. They gotta take whatever the network is feeding them. And in this case, it's gonna be two hours of rent or time to buy stuff from Allen. But the affiliates, I gotta think this is gonna be a wedge or at least a new point of contention in the next affiliate relations conversations with CBS for those stations.

I don't know at this moment if the affiliates are able to now opt out of taking those two. Hours of time bought space and being able to reprogram them now. For their own needs, right? Either for redoing local news or perhaps experimenting with their own local programming. Which we hinted at before is maybe something stations should be thinking about doing anyway because it's just going in that direction.

If you wanna stand out, you'd be local. Committing to more local programming is probably gonna be a very good thing in the long run, but irrespective of that, how do you think affiliates sit with that? Because I think the prestige of two hours of late night from a network like CBS. Is it gonna injure their late news?

What's that late news gonna lead into anymore? I wonder what's gonna be the value equation for an affiliate for evening programming on a CBS affiliate. 

Jim Wilson: Again, broadcasters are in the business to make money, right? They're in the business to generate eyeballs. They're in the business to speak to communities. They're in the business of promoting communities through advertising and bringing all these services. And to the extent that the quality of the content isn't there, I would hope that they would have the ability to utilize their own content.

And again I go back to conversations that we've had before. I know there's a lot of dialogue going around these mergers within the space. But if I see all these dynamics playing out, right? Streamers getting larger, big tech companies going into content. You see the CBS’s of the world, reducing the amount of programming that's putting more pressure on these broadcasters to really focus on building out content in order to do that.

You need scale. And so if Netflix has a hundred percent reach across the country, a broadcaster will not be able to create content unless it can create it efficiently and with a strong ROI. It's a difficult situation. I think that as anyone's evaluating these mergers, they need to take all of these dynamics into account.

And I've been reading some of the news and it's coming up, one side arguing this and one side arguing that. But hopefully, obviously there's gonna be, even though this stay just got extended, someone's gonna be able to hopefully weigh in and do the right thing. 

Tim Hanlon: I guess I'll leave you with this imponderable. Is this you think unique or limited maybe to CBS or is this a hint of perhaps what NBC and ABC may be going through? And that is their own reevaluation of the late night network day part? 

Jim Wilson: I think they're probably going through a whole reevaluation of where they are. What are they producing content for?

Are they producing it for Peacock at NBC? Are they producing it for Disney Plus at ABC? Or are they producing it for Paramount at CBS? What comes first going forward? First, many series are launching on broadcast and on streaming at the same time. And so there are a number of streaming shows, frankly, I think that could probably find their way to network television.

There's so many shows on streamers at this point. It's a tough one. These content companies, these media companies that own streaming services and broadcast stations are going to be making decisions based upon where they're gonna find the biggest audiences.

Tim Hanlon: That's all we have for you this week. Thank you, of course, for listening. In addition to Jim, we also want to thank Stephanie Nerby over at Madhive, as well as the team at TVREV who helps put these pieces together. That's Melissa Horrigan and Jason Damata, Jessika Walsten, and the still on paternity leave and we wish him nothing but the best Mike Gabara. And last but certainly not least, our editing friend Jerry Payne in his audio excellence this week, he helps make us sound more intelligent perhaps than we really are. And we thank him of course, as always, for his assistance in putting this extravaganza together. We'll see you or talk to you at least next week here In the Vicinity.