Selling Local Media Is Now a Creative Job

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.

A local media seller walks into a first meeting with a regional home services company. She has a market study, a proposed schedule, and a rate card. The owner has a thirty-second spot for his own business that he made over the weekend, using a tool he found in a Google Ads menu.

His spot is mediocre. But it's also finished, which means the meeting is now about something other than whether he can afford to be on television.

Media was never the block

For most of the history of local advertising, the seller's advantage was access. Putting a small business on a screen took inventory, relationships, and a production budget, and the station or the platform controlled all three.

MNTN's advertiser data shows what that arrangement was actually gating. The company reports that 97% of its advertiser base had never run a television ad, and that the obstacle was creative rather than budget or targeting. Those businesses had money to spend and knew who they wanted to reach. What they lacked was a commercial, and any affordable way to get one made.

The wall came down in under two years. The IAB found that 86% of video ad buyers either use or plan to use generative AI for ad creative, and projected that AI-generated work would account for 40% of all advertisements by this year. Announcing Fiverr's AI Video Hub in March, CMO Matti Yahav said that "for decades, brand video has been at the mercy of the Hollywood production playbook," and that the model was breaking.

The distribution side moved at the same speed. Roku, Comcast, Disney, and Amazon have each built self-serve buying for small advertisers over the past two years, and Ad World News covered the production economics behind that shift in May, when platform after platform began giving creative away to capture the media buy behind it.

Less attention has gone to what all of this did to the person on the other side of the table.

The deck stopped being neutral

Opening a first meeting with a media plan used to be the professional move. It signaled preparation, market knowledge, a rep who had done the homework before showing up.

That signal has inverted. An advertiser who spent Saturday afternoon making his own commercial reads the same deck differently. He sees a meeting where nobody made anything.

Borrell Associates, which surveys roughly 10,000 small and mid-sized businesses annually, has tracked the same buyer growing steadily more self-directed. Previewing the 2026 local market, chief executive Gordon Borrell reported that 10% of advertisers already turn to AI for recommendations, including on traditional media, with another 23% considering it. The advertiser now arrives with material, and increasingly with a view.

What advertisers expect from a seller now

The local account executive has traditionally been measured on relationships, category knowledge and the ability to build and defend a schedule. Those remain necessary. They've stopped being sufficient, because the advertiser can evaluate creative before the media conversation even opens.

The gap this creates for local media companies is structural rather than tactical. A broadcaster pivoting to CTV revenue needs advertisers who have CTV-ready creative, and the local businesses driving that growth mostly do not. National brands arrive with assets. Car dealerships, medical practices and service businesses do not, and the sale stalls at the same point it always has.

Revenue chiefs on both sides of the tooling describe the change in similar language. Discussing an industry survey on CTV buying, Tegna Chief Revenue Officer Tim Fagan said advertisers are looking for "partners that can help them turn premium video into real business results." Delivering impressions against a schedule doesn't answer that request. It asks the revenue function to carry creative capability that has historically lived somewhere else in the building.

"Creative used to be something the sales team requested and the creative team delivered. Now the rep needs a point of view about the advertiser's business before the first meeting starts. Most teams haven't reorganized around that yet, and you can see it in their close rates," said Hayden Gilmer, Chief Revenue Officer at Waymark, who's presenting on the subject at a company session later this month.

Why it matters this quarter

BIA Advisory Services projects local advertising will grow 8.1% this year, to $184.5 billion. Political spending accounts for most of that increase. Core local growth, with political stripped out, comes to 2%, and the political money leaves the market in November.

Sentiment among the buyers themselves is worse. In the same Borrell briefing, Executive VP of Local Market Intelligence Corey Elliott reported that 45% of surveyed SMBs expected economic conditions to worsen over the following six months, against 16% expecting improvement. Cautious buyers in a market growing at 2% make every close harder to win than it was a year ago, and make every lost first meeting cost more.

What changes next quarter

Fourth-quarter and first-quarter conversations are already underway, and the advertisers in them have a reference point for what video costs and how quickly it can be produced. A rep who hasn't accounted for that is negotiating against a number the client already knows.

The account executives holding their numbers this year have largely stopped treating creative as the thing that happens once the deal is signed. They bring it into the room first and let the media conversation follow.