Ed McLoughlin, our co-founder and COO, has a piece in TVNewsCheck that lays out something we hear from local broadcasters constantly: the tools they’ve been handed weren’t built for the business they’re actually running.
In “Local Media Needs Its Own Stack,” Ed makes the case that global DSPs were engineered for holding companies and national buyers — not for the account executive juggling hundreds of hyper-targeted campaigns across ZIP codes for restaurants, auto dealers, and healthcare providers down the street. Every layer of customization in those national platforms becomes a tax on local teams, and the cost of execution too often eats the revenue the campaign generates.
“When global platforms claim they ‘support local,’ what they usually mean is that local campaigns are allowed into systems designed for someone else. That’s duct-tape compatibility, not product-market fit.” — Ed McLoughlin
His argument is clear-eyed: this isn’t a failure of local broadcasters. It’s a failure of the tools they’ve been forced to adopt. Reselling national platforms or bolting on more workflow tools won’t close the gap. Local media needs infrastructure that starts with local realities — unified omnichannel workflows, turnkey attribution for retail advertisers, AI-enabled planning grounded in local market norms, and the simplicity that lets sellers do what they do best without an army of analysts behind them.
This is one of the most important conversations happening in our industry. Local teams already know their communities, advertisers, and demand patterns better than any national platform ever could. What’s been missing is technology that respects that expertise.
