If the acquisition of US TV station operator Tegna by Standard General for $5.4 billion is anything to go by, local TV can still be big business.

Although it has lagged national ad sales’ increasing use of advanced TV targeting tactics on some fronts, lighting up local with similar capabilities is a fascinating and lucrative prospect.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Adam Helfgott, CEO, MadHive, explains what local has to gain – and how it has to be treated differently.

It’s different for donuts

“As people are moving into more IP- delivered (TV) … the market for local CTV is going to grow about five, six hundred million dollars this year,” Helfgott says.

“But the way we look at it is that actually servicing a local campaign for CTV is very, very hard.

“It’s different than broadcast where I can use a Nielsen book and say what shows to buy.

“Here, I need to find every impression in a small, tiny, local market in order to get a possible customer into that donut shop or whatever it is.”

Local platforms

The challenge of enabling local TV for CTV is one being approached by a number of companies.

For instance, Tegna – which operates 64 news brands and other networks including True Crime Network and Quest – has its Premion platform, which places ads on its content.

Helfgott’s MadHive works with broadcast groups to enable their salespeople to visit, plan, buy and measure across linear and IP-delivered TV, amongst other channels.

Discussion agenda

“Then we extend those same tools out to direct the consumer and other things where the KPI is more on something around sales in a local market, rather than reach or frequency or things like that,” Helfgott explains.

He says applying such tools to local necessarily requires a
“very high-speed way of making decisions on the giant availability of impressions” in the local market.

MadHive’s Helfgott is amongst the attendees at Beet Retreat San Juan, one of the industry’s most talked about gatherings of high-level media executives, at the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico, March 16–18, 2022.

The event how explores how changing consumer preferences and new service launches are transforming the TV and premium video marketplace, deep diving into the latest developments in streaming and OTT, data and audience targeting, measurement and attribution and international opportunities.

You are watching coverage from Beet Retreat San Juan 2022, presented by AppScience, Infillion, MadHive, SpringServe, Univision & VideoAmp. For more videos, please visit this page.