Local media doesn’t have a technology shortage. It has a connection problem.
Years of adding best-of-breed platforms — a DSP here, an attribution tool there — solved real problems one at a time. What it also built was a stack where reporting requires three logins and revenue visibility depends on reconciling systems that were never designed to talk to each other.
AI raises the stakes. Automation is only as useful as the information it can reach, and a planning tool that can’t see performance data will keep making narrower recommendations no matter how smart the model behind it is.
Local media feels this more acutely than national buyers do. When one seller builds the proposal, launches the campaign, pulls the report, and manages the relationship, every handoff comes straight out of selling time.
In TVNewsCheck, Ed McLoughlin makes the case for why local media is moving toward operating-system-style platforms — and what changes when people, data, and AI finally work from the same foundation.
