Local Advertising's Power Duos: Locality's Ann Hailer & Keith Kazerman Talk Broadcast & Streaming (Podcast)

Hailer represents over 300 local broadcast television stations nationwide, with a track record of almost 5000 ad deals done. Kazerman, who has been selling digital TV since the early aughts, streamlines streaming (!), overseeing the exclusive inventory of more than 150 publishers. “There’s a massive amount of opportunity across content that is available locally. That needs to get aggregated together in a way that builds scale and impacts the communication goals that advertisers have in each marketplace,” Hailer said. Though a Herculean task, their experience servicing TV stations as CoxReps, and Gamut for streaming, paved the way for Locality's success as a merged entity.

“The power resides,” Kazerman added, "in both together,” and led to what Locality has coined "Precision Reach" – targeted premium local inventory, which can be scaled to every U.S. DMA.

Think About It: It’s All Local

This approach should resonate with national brands as well as small business. While wide reaching national advertising can build brand awareness, when you think about it, “every purchase made actually occurs locally,” Kazerman is fond of pointing out. People vote locally, cheer their home team, buy milk to cars at local locations, and regardless, he adds, “Whether it's in a brick & mortar within that community or sitting on someone's sofa in their living room on an e-commerce site while they're streaming and using a secondary device,” it’s, yup, in a geographic locality.

Local is Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile

Beyond selling local at scale, Locality also helps brands tailor and customize their creative for respective markets to make messages more relevant and lift performance. For example, auto groups in broad areas can easily customize their spots to feature dealer locations, down to the zip code.

Local advertising is also critical for political advertising. Hailer calls it the "ultimate one-day sale." With $11 billion to be spent in the next cycle, nearly all of it will go to local outreach proving what savvy pols understand about local ads' impact.

Context and relevance counts, but so does content: a hometown mentality can pay off for advertisers who appear in sports and news content. For example, after years of “inviting the local anchor into their living rooms, people place trust in local broadcasters,” Hailer said, which creates a "halo effect" for advertisers in news. And, spoken as the rabid Detroit Lions fan that she is, added, “there’s nothing like live, especially live sports”.

While Hailer’s side thrives with live, Kazerman – a Celtics and Patriots fan all the way – and revealing only a hint of rivalry, said nonetheless that "primetime is all the time" in streaming, as it lets viewers “engage whenever they want.” Plus, the digital insights extracted from streaming data helps inform strategies.

Evening the Playing Field

Speaking of insights and measurement, Kazerman acknowledged its “an area where we are very focused. We feel we need to lead, given our size and scale across broadcast and streaming, to move the industry forward. We're very encouraged that National over the last few years has worked really hard, collaboratively, across all sides of the desk – agencies, advertisers, ad sales and publishers – to bring together standardization; it’s an area where we as an industry need to move that together. We are part of CIMM (Coalition for Innovation and Media Measurement), and work with broadcast partners and publishers, to move that forward. It will break down hurdles, especially from the buy side, to create consistency and standardization, which will only empower local investment more, which is what we're built for: to unlock that power of local, and that investment in local advertising.”

Driving Brand Value and Purpose

The increased focus on local also presents opportunities for brands to drive value and purpose. As Hailer notes, even big chains like Target are supporting small business by showcasing locally made products, and customizing messaging to spotlight hometown pride. This localized approach builds brand equity and appreciation.

Locality itself prides itself on core values beyond just smart selling. Hailer cited their commitment to DE&I and mentorship. Kazerman stressed that with big internal shifts post-merger, and certainly in the industry overall, change management to guide employees is crucial and personally fulfilling. He lives by "respect all, fear none," promoting mutual respect. Hailer advises finding champions everywhere and embracing reverse mentorship.

With consumers and brands alike gravitating to local, companies like Locality and the advertisers they serve are poised to drive business success and social impact through community-focused efforts. The future looks bright for this powerful local advertising duo.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.