Brand-Built Video Becomes The Edge For Local Advertisers As AI Cuts Production Cost

Ad World News is funded by Waymark, which sells AI video production tools to media companies, agencies and ad platforms. Waymark hosts a session on premium video creative for SMB advertisers on September 30. Details and registration.

Local video advertising has become far easier to buy into. AI tools have taken broadcast-quality video from something only large budgets could reach to something a family restaurant or an auto dealer can afford, and the production barrier that kept small advertisers off the air has largely come down. Used well, those same tools can help a local business set itself apart.

Many advertisers reach for the same generators and templates, though, and their spots start to look alike. For a small advertiser that sameness carries a cost, because much of its advantage over a national competitor comes from specificity. A local business stands out by being recognizably itself to an audience that already knows it.

Alex Persky-Stern is Waymark's CEO. "Cheap, fast video put a lot of local businesses on the air for the first time, and that mattered. What still takes work is making a spot that looks like your business and no one else's," he says.

Same spots, small markets

A family restaurant, a dental practice that has been in the same building for 30 years, an HVAC company whose whole pitch is that a person answers the phone, a funeral home. What sets these businesses apart is familiarity and a face, and their advertising works when it puts that on the screen. A generic spot strips it out.

For a national brand, a spot that misses is a manageable loss. New creative goes into production, and the quarter absorbs it. A weak impression lands on strangers in a market the brand will never set foot in, so it stays a number on a report. A local advertiser has none of that distance. Its audience already knows the business.

At that scale, reputation is the standing a business holds with the people in one place, and word of mouth carries most of the weight. Nielsen found that 88% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know more than any advertising channel. Both are unforgiving of a canned spot. A local business lives with the impression its one commercial leaves, in the only market it has.

Built from the brand

Start with the business itself. A spot built from a company's own footage, its storefront, its staff, and the way it talks to customers looks like that company and no other. AI shapes and scales the work, but the raw material is the brand.

The tools take what makes a business recognizable and turn out versions of it, cut for different audiences and neighborhoods, without a full production cycle each time. An auto dealer might run a general brand spot in most places but need a different one to push service to a single neighborhood. "That service ad needs to be different for that particular audience," says Laura Brandano-Lauta, VP of Market Retail at Comcast Advertising. AI makes that kind of variation affordable, turning one brand spot into a service spot without a reshoot.

Affordability got local businesses on the air. What decides whether they stay top of mind is distinctiveness. Once every advertiser in a market can produce a spot, the ones made for one business stand out and the rest blend together, and the sellers who can deliver that kind of creative hold an edge that commodity output cannot match. For a local media company, brand-built creative is becoming the product, and the template is becoming table stakes.

Closing the gap between a stock template and a spot that belongs to one business is the subject of Waymark's session on September 30, where its creative team walks through premium features built for exactly that. Register now to reserve your spot.