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# Local Media Isn’t Dying. It’s Becoming a $185 Billion Battleground
- URL: https://tvrev2beta2.ghost.io/local-media-isnt-dying-its-becoming-a-185-billion-battleground/
- Published: 2026-09-08T16:00:45.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-08T19:00:00.000Z
- Author: TVREV
- Tags: Local, Proximity

Local media remains a $185 billion business. The bigger question is who will capture that spending as audiences and advertisers move across broadcast television, CTV, streaming audio, social video and other digital channels.

In the latest episode *In the Vicinity*, **Tim Hanlon** sits down with **BIA Advisory Services** Managing Director **Rick Ducey** to examine how local advertising is evolving, why political spending is accelerating the shift toward CTV, and whether broadcasters can transform quickly enough to remain relevant. As Ducey explains, demand for local media isn’t disappearing, but the companies competing for it, and the ways they monetize it, are changing fast.

*Listen to the full In the Vicinity podcast above or get it on*[ *Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-the-vicinity/id1882154521?ref=tvrev2beta2.ghost.io) *and*[ *Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/show/2m6tY96stUSpTPUKc0J8Wh?ref=tvrev2beta2.ghost.io)*.*

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**Tim Hanlon:** Hi there, everybody. How are you? You are *In the Vicinity*. Welcome to the proceedings. My name's Tim Hanlon, founder and CEO of The Vertere Group here in Chicago, the consultative and advisory firm focused on media and technology companies big and small and very much in between. Happy to have you back for another week our weekly sojourn into all things local media.

Pleased to have as my guest this week, Rick Ducey. He's the managing director of a firm that most people in local media rely on religiously, and if you don't know of them you'll certainly learn more about them in this conversation. It's BIA Advisory Services, and they are perhaps the gold standard in understanding what's going on in local media and advertising forecasts and constantly updated data guiding various aspects of how local business can and should look at media and understanding where most effective that media and that advertising can be.

They are celebrating literally this week their 43rd year of doing this stuff. And you can find out more about how they're celebrating at their website at [bia.com](http://bia.com/?ref=tvrev2beta2.ghost.io). But before we do so, stay tuned for this informative chat with Rick, who's been there for, oh, about half of its existence, maybe 20 some odd years.

Since 2000, I think. As we talk about all kinds of stuff related to local media the challenges of understanding the various media forms as technology has digitized those. The things formerly known as Yellow Pages or local television stations are now cross-pollinating and becoming multiple sellers of media touchpoints and stuff.

We'll talk about that. We'll talk about where the current forecast for ad spend in local sits right now and what it looks like in the coming months as political advertising ramps up for its biannual fun fest and all bunches of other things. And as always I learn a lot in these conversations.

But stand by here for a very informative conversation with my old pal Rick Ducey, he of BIA Advisory Services. You're gonna learn a ton. Please, as always, enjoy.

I do think a lot of people are familiar with your name and certainly the firm that you're with. Maybe you could give us a little bit of background for perhaps those who are uninitiated or for some reason have been living under a rock and don't know who and what BIA Advisory is. Maybe you can explain that a little bit, and then also your journey to its founding and running.

**Rick Ducey:** Yes, I'll tell you a bit about myself. I'm with BIA, managing director now. We do all different kinds of things. We're basically a boutique firm. Our model is we have a lot of senior executives in the company, and that's who we put to work with our clients. So people who are seasoned, experienced work with a lot of different clients.

Pretty much exclusively in the local media space. We do some assignments, we've done some international assignments for some bigger companies, a bunch of countries, like 12, 18 countries applying some sort of advisory paradigm that they're interested in and getting some information back. And within local we have tended to focus on the media side.

Again, we do have some brand and agency and platform clients, particularly recently but mostly it's been the media side. And I'll say that just this week we passed a 43-year mark. So our CEO founder, who's still active day-to-day Tom Buono, wrote a blog post, a LinkedIn post talking about, wow, 43 years in this business.

So Tim, you and I were just talking about audio and video media channels and podcasts and so on over the past few years, and lately we have the pre-COVID, COVID, and post-COVID kind of mentality. But man, going back 43 years is how much things have changed. So BIA, we work with local ad forecasts.

That's one of our main things now. For each of the 210 major media markets, basically TV markets, we also do some number of radio markets. We can do different geographies. So one of the things we're going to market with recently is that forecast, which is a 10-year frame, five years back, five years forward, each market I think it's 96 different business categories and 18 different media.

And so on the media side, it's like, okay, wow, there's 18 different verticals. I can get that forecast for my market. That really helps me see where growth is, where decline is, where media channel spending is shifting from TV over the air to CTV, for example. So I may wanna prioritize. And everybody sells everything these days.

TV groups will sell, they'll love to sell their six o'clock news, but they're just as happy to sell TikTok or even Amazon inventory. So how do I organize all of that opportunity in my market against verticals? Where's growth? I wanna put some sales prioritization there. Where's decline? I wanna see if I can cover the downside or maybe start to move some of those sellers or time for those sellers into some other categories.

So that's been very successful. We have a lot of the major TV groups, a lot of the digital pure plays who are moving into local. And I love your column and your podcasts Tim and the focus you're putting on local. There's opportunity there. So you get these big companies that are used to selling into the national market and, okay where's our next, scaler?

How are we gonna scale from this into our next revenue growth area? And all of a sudden they find out about this market that we've been covering that's $180 billion plus of localized spend, so they wouldn't even know that market existed. How do we get it? So they find us, we find them and go on.

So I've been with BIA since 2000\. I started off working sort of two jobs, one with BIA doing strategic advisory consulting and then getting into some of these other business models and client engagements. We also started a tech company called SpectraRep back in 2000, which specialized in digital datacasting with ATSC 1.0 stations.

So that company's been around, it's still around now. It's actually I believe the only TV data casting company that has made net money like millions of dollars over the years. So there's a lot of different engagements now with the marketplace, with the TV groups and others trying to get into that market.

**Tim Hanlon:** So that was interesting. Especially with 3.0 seemingly looming, right? The idea of doing data is not... I think people don't remember the NAB shows that you and I used to walk, seeing these geo casts and iBlasts and all that kind of stuff. Sure. The whole idea was part of the original digital transition in the first place. 

**Rick Ducey:** You're exactly right. And a lot of money, a lot of companies, popped up like mushrooms after a lot of rain, and disappeared when it dried out. But for whatever it's worth, Spectra is a quiet company, but has been around for a long time.

So it's fun starting it up. I learned a lot and I was leading that day to day for, I don't know, five or six years, and then transitioned over to full-time BIA. But you raise a really perfect point because that's how I got to BIA. I was at NAB, I was leading the research and information group, and I was at NAB for a long time, and I was asked to speak to the opportunity of digital transition from analog to digital TV back in the day when I was at NAB. So I said, "This is actually cool. There's some very interesting opportunities here for broadcasters, but it gets into a market they know nothing about, and have no infrastructure.

They don't, they just weren't equipped to get into it.” And so that's why we decided to start this company to say we can monetize that spectrum. And originally SpectraRep that model is familiar to broadcasters. The idea is give us your spectrum you're not selling, and we'll sell it for you.

That was the original notion of SpectraRep. And, again, a lot of money was put into that space and a lot of money was lost and a lot of companies started and went away. But Spectra is around. And then I got to NAB just for my little journey here, and I'll finish up here in maybe an interesting way.

I started off being an academic. I wanted to be a professor, so I went through all the graduate education and got a job on a faculty at Michigan State, and that was it. I was gonna do media research and the publish or perish kind of thing. But then the chairman of my department, and actually the chair of my dissertation committee, a gentleman named John Abel, flew in a plane with Eddie Fritts, who was then CEO, president of NAB, who was looking for somebody to head up a group at NAB in research.

And they hit it off, so they hired John. So all of a sudden, my chairman says, "Hey, do you wanna come to Washington and work for a trade association?" I'm like, "No, I wanna be a professor." He said, "Here are the kind of things we're working on." And I was like, "Oh, that actually sounds pretty interesting."

So joined him at NAB, and then with NAB I kept on running into Tom Buono and his clients are saying, "What do we do with this digital asset?" And he's seeing my presentations, and he said, we should start a company." I said “that sounds pretty interesting." So anyway, that's my journey, and now these days BIA works again with a lot of the major media companies and brands and mostly with the local advertising forecast, which maybe we can talk about what we're seeing there.

But the change, for I guess good news, bad news, being in a strategy and advisory services area, product roadmaps, M&A, competitive strategies, what's the market doing, how do we reorganize, things like that. When times get scary and tough it's actually a counter cycle for strategy.

It's like, we need some help, when times are good, we're brilliant, we don't need any help. When times are tough, I'm not sure what to do. Can you spitball us some ideas or be the red team and look at what we're thinking of doing and see if you come up with a different idea that we should evaluate?

So anyway there's probably a long quick story about me. 

**Tim Hanlon:** I would argue over those 43 plus years or so, right? BIA has become kind of a gold standard, if you will, of longitudinal and specific data that essentially define what's going on in the quote, unquote local space, especially as it's changed and morphed and lurched from business model to new touch points and all that kind of stuff.

Can you maybe take us on a quick journey as to some of the most major changes you've seen over that period of time? Obviously, you've been there maybe half that time, maybe since 2000 or so. But just even in that 25, 26-year span? The idea of what quote, unquote local media is there's no such thing really anymore as Yellow Pages.

Magazines are in the dustbin and newspapers are, I don't know what those are anymore, right? Let alone all the other stuff that's come into the mix, right? How would you characterize local media's existence over these last 25 years or so.

**Rick Ducey:** As I mentioned we're seeing the local media advertising market, which we define operationally as advertising that targets local consumers, whatever the platform.

If you're buying network TV advertising inventory, that's targeting the country, so we don't count that ad spend. But if it's an NBC O&O targeting local markets or an ABC or whatever and all the TV groups we count that. And we go to around 18 different media. So together, that's a hundred and eighty-five billion dollars or so.

So it's a very significant marketplace that we address, BIA and all the other players in the market. And it's growing. And as I mentioned earlier, to the point where people who are after international and US, nationwide kind of ad markets looking for the next pocket of growth, it's like that's a lot of money.

And we've got a lot of players competing there, but we have a scale advantage. We have a technology advantage. We have a brand advantage. You see a lot of different companies coming into the space that weren't there. So, as an example, sports and news has always been a strong suit, obviously, for newspapers, for radio, for TV and getting into the Yellow Pages, maybe not sports or news, but local information.

So local and that typically meant, particularly for the Yellow Pages, a segment of the market that they really addressed well, which is SMBs, small to medium businesses. There's maybe five million of those that have any kind of a budget for advertising. So that's one segment. And then you've got the bigger single location, multi-location, franchisee locations in single markets that have bigger budgets.

So that's QSR, quick serve restaurants, furniture stores, things like that. So a lot of times the national brand manager will control the ad and marketing spend. But a fair amount of time for franchisees and even owned outlets, they will say, "Look. We'll give you 10% back and buy local because we don't know what your market's like.”

We can do the national campaign, top of the funnel branding, but you gotta drill it in and get foot traffic, and you get website visitation and things like that. So nature and the tools available to local media to reach local audiences have changed. There's more of them. And at first it was brand A versus brand B. I'm gonna outsell a TV station across the street, and now I have to outsell Google, which is the biggest video player in the market right now.

So how do I do that? Google can do geotargeting, but it doesn't have direct relationships. They can't bring that local relevance. So the segmentation, the competitive differentiation has become really fascinating and, for the most part, clever, maybe slower than needed to be really successful in the market.

But it's a big market. There's room for a lot of different players and each has different models. And what's happening these days is everybody's selling everything. So if you go to a TV station, they'll come in there, "I'd love to sell you my over-the-air early news but we also stream it and we also have TikTok versions if you want to reach the TikTok segment."

And it's a portfolio. So media companies started off selling their own inventory, and now what they're trying to do is deliver audiences and increasingly engagement performance across different media platforms. So it's become really sophisticated, fascinating, challenging, and some of the players in this space, they just, they don't have it anymore.

So like newspapers, it's tough to compete on that platform. Yellow Pages, I can't remember the last time I physically touched a Yellow Pages book. There's just different ways to do it. The mobile phone, we call that the kind of the operating system of life now. So if what you do doesn't touch a smartphone you're probably not gonna be relevant to most of the market.

**Tim Hanlon:** I would imagine half of the value that your organization brings to the industry is helping people just even decipher where the distinctions are, right? And I gotta think also be maddening because you also from a measurement perspective, especially things like ad spend and whatnot, you gotta be very careful and very specific around what is or isn't double counted or triple counted and stuff, right? So how is the digital transition or transformation or evolution of these, let's say, classic local media forms, television, radio, out of home, these kinds of things, how do you account for all of those entities all trying to figure out their own way and maybe simultaneously trying to also offer digital touch point A, B, and C as well as part of their panoply of offerings?

**Rick Ducey:** It's a really smart question, and, I wish to heck I had a really smart answer, but I'll give it a shot. From an analyst perspective, we'd like to go back to basic measurement theory, which is you have categories that are exhaustive, account for all the possibilities, and mutually exclusive, which is tough to do now because the categories are so mixed.

So if we say video what is video? We used to have a category, we'd call it OTT, trying to follow the market. What does OTT mean? It's streaming video. When you go to market, there's six-second YouTube ads. That's video. And then there's a 30-second spot on a local TV station. That's video. But they're different marketplaces because there's different demand, different price curves, different creative, different kinds of goals and so on and so forth. It's tough to bucket things the way people wanna do it. For our media clients, they're selling inventory. We wanna go to market and sell inventory.

What they call that inventory and how they differentiate it from competition and show the value for what they're selling gets a little bit difficult because it's not always clear exactly what they're bringing to clients and how to deliver it. So we struggle with that. Right now we're going through a new set of media taxonomies, media definitions.

The Video Ad Bureau is out there seeking input from the industry. What do we call things? They have a pretty sophisticated complicated way of defining a market. So you have to balance being technically accurate versus we don't talk like that, when we're buying and selling.

It may be accurate. But so like OTT, we morphed into CTV/OTT, the idea being that OTT, a huge growth component in local media and that's any kind of streaming, and we pretty much define that by device. So that could be a notebook, tablet phone, big TV screen, anything that falls into OTT. CTV has become a competitive media channel because it targets the big TV set, so it wants the linear budget, which is still huge in spite of secular trends of decline or slower growth at least.

So we have a bucket, CTV and OTT. CTV we try to keep now on its own. OTT we try to break out to give people some guidance. So what is my addressable opportunity in CTV in Houston, Texas? We have an estimate for that. And if it's not premium long form video and inventory that's designed for a TV screen and a streaming video, we put that in OTT.

And that per TV station, for example, when they do OTT, a lot of times that is streaming video, but it's owned and operated assets on their websites. They'll take their news, take those 30, 60, 90-second packages and stream them from their website and sell ads or sponsorships in those. That's kind of the high growth area, the fast breaking area.

So we try to track that in the 18 media categories. We'll split further into social video and now out of home, which is becoming a high growth area, not so much to traditional signage, but digital, which now becomes more video and operationally it's much easier to plan, activate, and evaluate with the digital platforms.

And a lot of that's video too. So we're finding some of our media clients are selling and their buying clients are buying cross-platform video in a market. It's like my younger daughter once when we were talking at a dinner and said something about a lawyer. I think she was four at the time or something.

Somebody said something about a lawyer, and she said, "If you have a phone, you have a lawyer." And so it's like for local video if you want local video, we have it for you. We've got all across all the different platforms, and that's what clients want increasingly. Yeah, it's changed a lot.

The categories change. What we forecast, what people wanna know is how do I put sales effort prioritization and resourcing against these different media opportunities? So our forecast with that, we give some market intelligence behind it, what the drivers are, what the context is, and then ultimately a quantitative forecast.

Here's where we see the spend going, and here's why we see it going there. 

**Tim Hanlon:** Does retail media come into your purview, or are you trying to still crack that nut, so to speak? 

**Rick Ducey:** We've spent a lot of time studying that in recent years. Internally, I would say, typically there's marketing and advertising budgets and at a high level, roughly speaking, maybe it's 50/50.

For some of the bigger brands and agencies, maybe half of the ad and marketing spending is paid media spending, and half is some sort of marketing, end caps and retail outlets.

And then to your point earlier, if things change Amazon, the biggest retail media network said, "Yeah, we sell a lot of stuff on the platform, and we make a lot of money and people do searches."

And it's Google's making a lot of money with the searches. We do more searches than them maybe specifically in purchasing searches. So let's sell some ads. And it's like, wow, that worked pretty well. And then Walmart and these different companies, grocery stores, department stores and anybody with a big customer base said we have a lot of customer data, and media companies love with data about what they're buying, first-party buy data.

So we have that. Maybe we should do some partnerships." And then you start to say maybe actually we should get into the media business. Why don't we buy some of these companies? Then we have first-party purchase data which we can target against our media data and have a fuller purchase funnel story to tell to advertisers."

So then you have retail media networks, they stood them up. I did a presentation, I don't know, 10 or 12 years ago to a bunch of CEOs saying every company is a media company, and it was exactly on this point that if you have a consumer segment and you can match that to a media segment, great.

And so websites like Home Depot, all these, Kroger started to have ads, started to have video and how-to videos and maybe some different kinds of videos. They're media companies, and they can sell ads against it. So it started off with endogenous advertisers, companies that already are in their stores, and then they said “let's go outside our store network.

We can sell ads to anybody. We don't care. This is a whole line of business.” So we looked at that, and we reminded ourselves our identity is around local ad spending. For the most part, this is around sponsorships and sort of national campaign execution. We've been watching it. It's a ton of money, and obviously inside those platforms, geo-targeting happens, and when geo-targeting happens, our ears get raised and we say we should be there."

So we've been looking at retail media networks. We haven't done any formal forecasting, but from some clients who have looked at that, we even went to some of our TV broadcast clients and said, "Here's what we're seeing in retail media. As you guys are seeking pockets of growth.” You've got the audience, they've got the first-party data.

As a TV group, you're big enough to go to some of these companies and start to cut some deals. But, they're maybe starting to do that but not so much. But it's a huge thing obviously, and we've only peripherally touched it so far, but it's something I expect we'll get more into.

**Tim Hanlon:** Maybe that's all the under the hood kind of stuff, right? Clients are counting on you to essentially keep up with the methodology and make sure that's rigorous enough so that you can, say, assume that you can't, double count and that kind of stuff, and keep the data as crisp and as clean as possible.

Besides that though when you start to look at the actual projections, right? You had your latest, annual forecast back in April. You hinted at it before, but regardless of all those changes underneath in aggregate these numbers continue to grow on the local front, largely?

**Rick Ducey:** They do. So we're in a tough world in case you didn't know. And that affects macroeconomic, microeconomic, and industry sector specific, and then category specific impacts, auto versus finance versus HVAC, for example. Tariffs matter. Pricing matters. So they're just saying the K-shaped economy where it was the rich get richer and then the poor get poorer, whatever.

So in the upper part of the K economy, things are great, people are doing well in the stock market, their investments. So sure about bonds these days. You look at that every day to see what's gonna happen next, see what tariffs do to different equities. But basically, people who are well off are spending like crazy, so that's a great part of the market.

If you have something for that part of the market, good. The lower part of the K is "I'm not sure about jobs. I'm not sure about getting a raise. Should I make that major durable purchase or should I try to hold off?" So just a little bit of different stories trying to understand that.

So getting into those kinds of nuances is important. But yeah, so double counting and being accurate is a big challenge. I always like to quote George Box, a British statistician who said, and it's been variously quoted, and he may not have come up with it, but he gets attributed to this quote a lot "All forecasts are wrong, some are useful."

So we work our hardest to be right but we work even harder to at least be useful, to be directionally correct, whatever. 

**Tim Hanlon:** How would you characterize the current state right now? We're going into a political season, right? There's obviously the old displacement thing that's gonna come. Is it robust?

Is the forecast still holding relatively strong given what you just described for local ad spending in general? You don't see any major cliffs in the near term, do you? 

**Rick Ducey:** We don't. A lot of the changes are relatively minor. So you're right, we did an April forecast, and we update two or three times a year.

We're just putting the final touches on our updated forecast from April that we'll be releasing in a week or so. Hopefully it helps people during budget season as they look ahead to 2027\. 

Political has been huge, of course. And there's a couple things about political. Obviously, we're in a midterm year, so we expect political to go up. One of the changes we keep making is around CTV. That's big screen format video, highly engaging. The political campaigns and consultancies love it. So that spend on CTV has been increasing. So if you look at CTV, we're seeing maybe two and a quarter billion dollars in political spending in 2026.

So we took that up a bit, about $805 million for this cycle for 2026, and it'll probably go up again in the next general election cycle in 2028\. So that's one of our biggest increases from April is like, wow it's going crazy. And you mentioned crowd out. We just did a podcast on that, talking to a couple different folks about what that looks like, what the magnitude looks like.

And the thing, if you're in the TV business, which is a prime destination for ad spending for political campaigns, you get crowded out. You're 60 days before the general election, 45 days before the primaries, where you have to do the lowest unit rate, and that's when the campaigns and their various enablers, if you will, want to buy TV.

With the Supreme Court decision coming out saying that there can be coordination between some of these entities and the campaign which wasn't allowed before, that implies more spending but potentially at the lowest unit rate. So more spending, higher volume but a lower rate. But then there's another court case that says, "Oh no. You don't have to charge the lowest unit rate media." So balancing that all out, more demand and there’s probably gonna be more spend. So then your local HVAC dealer, your local tier three dealer, looks at available inventory in the early news, say, and it's like it's just not there at any price, or it's there, but here's how much it's gonna cost.

And it's say what? So that's one of the reasons for CTV growth. The TV stations have a lot of their own owned and operated content in their OTT part of that, but also in their CTV. Look, we love that you love our news. Thank you. However, if what you're really buying is audiences, we can deliver that exact same audience to you at scale in local.

Now, when the TV stations sell that inventory, they love to sell their own inventory first, but they sell everybody's. They'll sell Netflix, they'll sell Amazon, they'll sell anything that targets that audience. So that allows them to get more political spend across the different platforms, not just over-the-air, but also CTV.

And then I mentioned TikTok, that's huge. Some of these digital companies don't allow political advertising, so you get gated out of that. But where you can, it's a great audience extension, but also you have different creative strategies to build a whole campaign messaging and call to engagement.

**Tim Hanlon:** Let me ask you one sort of last question. We've zoomed through a whole bunch. 

**Rick Ducey:** I know. My gosh, this is fun. 

**Tim Hanlon:** We'll have you back for sure. But let me ask you this maybe roundup question and maybe it will leave our audience hanging a little bit to the extent that they'll hang on our every word for the next episode. ... We'll find out. You've gotten us into the television, the local television space here. And I think you said in not so many words, almost a default logic or thinking, right? That the local television station business and brand and proposition is, would you call it maybe the last sort of traditional local form of media still fundamentally standing, yet is already being nibbled around or being forced to transform itself, maybe somewhat inelegantly, right?

With CTV and these kinds of things. I guess what I'm trying to say is there is a default sort of reflex that the television station proposition is the one that is still most capable of maybe re-corralling all the digital permutations of stuff out there because of the brand, the legacy, the local news, the heritage, and those kinds of things.

But I'm not sure. I don't think everybody's convinced that stations and station groups are gonna effectively evolve fast enough before another newspaper or another radio station story. So I guess the question in there is, what do you see the local television station evolving to, and is it evolving fast enough to stay relevant, especially with all these digital touchpoints and arguably an inherent benefit or capability to be that brand to wrap these things all up into one neat package?

**Rick Ducey:** That's an awesome question. I'll give a tale of two cities answers here if I could. So on the one hand, even forecasting several years ahead, we see local TV as foundational to a lot of campaigns. Some campaigns, even the SMB segment, too expensive.

However, with self-serve programmatic platforms, even for linear TV but also all the CTV that these TV groups are selling they can get a lot of exposure to that SMB segment that's self-serve. You can't afford to put a six-figure salesperson to go chasing down the hardware store. But if the hardware store says, "Oh, I can get exposure to your six o'clock news branding on a TV ad that comes through CTV.” I don't care, because they're reaching their audience.

So TV groups and, there's been a lot of resurgence in interest in audio podcasting and streaming. Same thing for video and audio platforms, highly engaging and, who knows that business better than broadcasters who have been around it for years? The tech companies are huge.

They have a lot of scale, a lot of tech advantages, efficiencies but they don't really necessarily know the business as well, which is why they're hiring a lot of people out of media, so they learn the business fast. But I would say one city is, yes the broadcast groups have a good history, have great relationships selling direct accounts. They have terrific local brands. You see the TV groups like the Scripps, the Grays, the Sinclairs, the Nexstars working around concepts of content like sports and news that's inherently local. That has high audience engagement and something that they can leverage. The regional sports networks idea didn't work so well because that rode on a MVPD, a cable platform, which is in steep decline.

But broadcast works a little bit better. So they have several significant levers they can pull for success. So that's kind of the happy city. The more challenging city is if you're talking about innovation and what our innovation strategy is, if you're in the media in 2026, arguably you've lost a ton of ground and it's gonna be hard for you to catch up.

Innovation has come and gone. We're in the post-innovation age. Things are moving so fast that we should do some things digital. It's like, wow, maybe get a digital fax machine. It'll fax faster. I'm teasing a bit, but right now you have to be a leader in this space, not a follower, if you want to be in it for the long game. There's inertia.

I was at a conference where somebody asked a question very similar to this, and somebody from an agency said, "I've got a client that is never gonna go digital. We have been explicitly instructed to only buy broadcast TV because they love it, it's always worked, and they expect it always will work."

And then it's like everyone was like, "Wow." More often you get people saying look at the CPMs for TV, and I look at the effect of CPM and a potential waste in a market versus how I can much more specifically target with CTV. So I can spend the same budget and get twice the impact by buying CTV."

And CTV used to be seen as an audience extension, a channel extension. It's huge. So it's its own media channel now. So the not so happy city is, if you're still fussing around with "Let's get our digital strategy together, and let's sell ads on our owned and operated websites and OTT services," that's fine. It should be there. But you also need to be in all these other points of presence. And some of our media clients will say, "We sell our inventory. We're just as happy to sell Amazon inventory because we're selling audiences ultimately, and we need to be everywhere with our content and with audience segments our clients want."

**Tim Hanlon:** And that to me is the fascinating sort of touch point that I guess we'll leave on, is this notion of it's not preordained that the local TV stations will automatically survive all of this. I think you're gonna see a diversion of success and/or approaches, right? Some of which are based on economics of getting scale and M&A and all that kind of stuff.

And it still requires resources. It still requires more sophistication in terms of data and audiences. The use proposition changes, right? Because if people aren't sticking around for a local newscast on a linear television station how do you monetize? I think that's the biggest Achilles heel right now, is how do you take that news product and deliver it in all these other channels, which is relatively, I don't wanna say easy to do, but you kinda know how to break up the pieces and deliver it that way.

The harder part is to monetize all that and then aggregate that all up into something that approximates or issues what the linear TV ad easily sold used to offer, right? And I guess my point is that, and I think you probably somewhat agree that not every station group's gonna survive similarly, if at all.

**Rick Ducey:** And that's in any business segment, you see that. You've got the top four, five, six, seven, maybe eight firms, or usually the top four firms that control most of the market however you do it. There's sort of a battle between the tech-centric platform companies and the traditional media companies like Adam Symson at Scripps, who've been around for a million years and our heritage is gonna change.

We're refounding the company around news products, and news is not gonna be something you wait for us to give to you. It's always available. And actually, you're part of the news, help contribute to it. So redefining what that news experience is in a more engaging way, interesting. Doing more tech plays and data plays, like Disney's been building up tech platforms and data platforms self-serve, going after the small market, where they're attracting more independent agencies and more SMBs, growing revenue that way.

So there's different monetization strategies, different content strategies, and it all plays into a bigger picture of this decision recently with Google saying on the other hand, "you can keep everything." That's huge for Google, but it's also huge for the direction of the industry and how it's gonna evolve.

**Tim Hanlon:** All right, so here's the last question. It's a fastball straight down the middle. How would you characterize local media? Are you sanguine about its prospects? Are you cautiously optimistic about all the transformations and stuff? Do you see it continue to grow? Are you worried? Do you see any clouds on the horizon where this sort of local media sort of construct is going to be challenged or usurped or perhaps siphoned from some other forms of media out there?

Everybody I talk to seems to be in some way, shape or form still bullish about local, but they're not necessarily certain about what it necessarily looks like going forward of course because of all this stuff. How do you feel about it? 

**Rick Ducey:** Yeah, it's all of the above, essentially. There's gonna be winners, there's gonna be losers, there'll be hangers on who somehow stay in the game. They're not gonna scale, but they keep enough going to stay in the game. The character of the business will keep changing in terms of ownership and executional monetization models in the market. The bottom line, I think, is you have the national ad market, you have the local media market, and the local media market exists and it's $185 billion.

There's demand. So the challenge, the opportunity is how do we address and satisfy that demand in a compelling and sustainable fashion? That's what pretty much everybody's trying to figure out. So I was just speaking to a big independent agency the other day and talking about video. "Oh, video is hot, and we're totally integrated in our agency and everything we do is integrated."

And I said, "Wow, okay. So I hear that all the time. Are you really integrated?" He said, "Absolutely." So I said, "So we're adjusting our forecast to look at traditional linear platforms, broadcast, MVPD, the digital platforms like CTV, OTT, but we see more inventory being defined as or described as social video.

And so we're starting to break out TikTok and now what's a long form video? For the younger demos 10 minutes, five minutes, that's long form video. Maybe we need to change our view of what a long form video is." They said, "Oh, no. All we do is radio broadcast, TV broadcast, CTV, and streaming audio. That's all we care about. All those other digital things I don't care about." So that's an independent agency, one of the largest ones and that's a part of the market they're focused on. So that portends well for broadcasters. That's where they're strongest. So an agency like that, it's like, wow, let's be best friends.

Tell us more about your clients, tell us more about your campaign, and we can put together the audiences you need to reach across different media channels. And this agency said, "Okay, we wanna recommend more TV over-the-air and maybe more CTV but our clients are saying, 'Why are you doing that?'"

And so that was one of the base points of our conversation. It's like you guys have data that show tire dealers that they are shifting to CTV. So if you wanna share a voice or if our client in tire sales wants to have a competitive presence in that market, it's like in Memphis, here's what tire dealers are spending in CTV and OTA broadcast TV.

If you're not there, you better have a good strategy for why you're not, otherwise you're losing business.

**Tim Hanlon:** Many thanks to Rick and the website for BIA Advisory is [bia.com](http://bia.com/?ref=tvrev2beta2.ghost.io). Pretty easy. [BIA.com](http://bia.com/?ref=tvrev2beta2.ghost.io). They're celebrating 43 years of doing this local media analysis, and literally will be rolling out in the next couple of days their forecast for local ad spend update from their April origination. And that's coming out this week.

So be sure to check 'em out this week. And if you're not a client already or you wanna learn more about their services and their gold standard reporting again, [bia.com](http://bia.com/?ref=tvrev2beta2.ghost.io) is the place to go. I wanna thank, of course, our friends at TVREV for helping me put this show together for you for our 25th version of such.

25 episodes already in the can. Thank you to Melissa Hourigan, Mike Gasbara, Jessika Walsten, and Jason Damata, among others at TVREV, and our friends at Madhive for their sponsorship and support of this show, of course, as well. And cannot do this show without the great knob twiddling and audio excellence of Jerry Payne.

We thank him, of course, for helping us put our respective pieces together. Thank you for listening. Much more to come. See you next week here *In the Vicinity*.