Football season has just started. Sundays are for watching your home team and ordering your favorite local snacks and drinks. But if you’re watching from, say, Bears territory, you want to see an ad for a deep-dish pizza, not a Philly cheesesteak.
This example demonstrates why it’s increasingly essential to think outside of a national TV approach and incorporate local into TV advertising—whether broadcast, streaming or a combination of both (which we highly recommend).
With consumers now focusing more on the content they love rather than the platform it’s on, advertisers must be flexible and present across various media, especially during big events like live sports. Premium content will always attract viewers, no matter the platform. And reflecting the local culture, colloquialisms and communities to these viewers can turbocharge your TV buys like never before.
Local streaming and broadcast: better together
The unique strengths of broadcast and streaming TV combined can create highly engaging, localized campaigns that resonate deeply with consumers. This approach, combined with the right technology, allows for unmatched optimization for ad delivery.
Local TV messaging can penetrate places national campaigns cannot reach. The incremental reach local offers is vital because it extends your audience beyond those already covered by linear TV or national streaming campaigns. By employing locally targeted and audience-targeted streaming—such as by state, DMA, ZIP code and neighborhood—along with local broadcast TV’s unmatched reach potential in every market, advertisers get the precision reach they need to meet viewers where they are.
Local messaging also offers more personalization and relevance to audiences than national, helping build credibility and a halo effect for your brand. It can also lead to higher engagement, which, in turn, can effectively guide consumers through the entire purchase journey. A joint buy across streaming and broadcast platforms amplifies this approach, merging broadcast's broad reach with streaming's precise targeting capabilities, ensuring that campaigns engage consumers at every funnel stage.
In addition, with the infusion of artificial intelligence into creative strategies, we can now craft precise calls-to-action, such as prompting store visits and conversions, using location data and personalized incentives to maximize the reach and impact of national messaging in local markets. Incorporating elements such as local contact information and QR codes ensures that every ad gets views and engagement.
Best practices for executing a local streaming + broadcast TV strategy
The TV landscape remains fragmented and complex, especially in the ever-evolving world of sports consumption and media distribution, where the dynamics between local television viewership, streaming platforms and audience fragmentation have become increasingly difficult to navigate. But with a few best practices and the right partnerships, you can cut through these challenges and make local streaming and broadcast approaches your competitive advantage.
1. Access to a wide variety of publishers. Find a vendor with unique partnerships across streaming content owners and broadcast stations to create the scale necessary in a given market. For example, one vendor in this space, Locality, has partnerships with 150 streaming content owners and over 400 broadcast stations.
2. The ability to unify efforts. Improving collaboration in a fragmented space starts with integrated planning—aligning goals and strategies right from the start. You’ll want a unification partner who can streamline processes and align efforts to make it easier to achieve goals and execute campaigns seamlessly.
3. Brand suitability. Beyond essential location and audience targeting, advertisers must consider the brand suitability of the surrounding content and platform environment, plus the contextual relevance of messaging. If your vendor can deliver ads directly into the publishers' systems, that would make ad placements more transparent, brand-safe and reliable.
4. Incremental reach measurement. Seek a partner who can integrate linear and streaming data to provide a comprehensive view of reach and engagement. That way you can tailor strategies to each unique market, addressing specific regional dynamics and optimizing performance for every local audience to deliver measurable incrementality.
5. Leverage technology. AI now plays a significant role in optimizing ad delivery in local advertising. Analyzing vast amounts of data in real time can enable advertisers to understand their audience better. AI can help vendors deliver more relevant, personalized ads, reducing ad “waste” through better targeting.
As we move into a season when the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL all play (not to mention an abundance of political campaigns at every level), there are powerful opportunities for those TV advertisers who run converged campaigns in a local market across both streaming and broadcast. Your brand can use the power of local video advertising to enhance and complement national campaigns surrounding these events, further engaging consumers at every funnel stage in a meaningful and measurable way. Find a partner who can help you make this opportunity a reality.
