Now, Local Advertisers Can Get on TV. Looking Like They Belong There Is the Hard Part.

For a long time, the hard part of local advertising was getting on the air at all. Professional video cost too much and took too long, so most small and mid-sized advertisers never reached the screen. That's changed. Between streaming, self-serve platforms, and generative video, a local business can get onto TV and CTV faster and more affordably than at any point in the medium's history.

Arriving turned out to be the straightforward part. The harder question is what plays once you get there.

Anant Joshi, Director of Business Development International at Magnite, describes the economics that used to lock small advertisers out. "The main barrier we had before was these SMEs didn't have the capabilities of maybe spending $10,000 on a video ad," he says, "whereas they might be happy to spend 5,000 or 10,000 on media." The media was affordable; the commercial was not. Generative tools have since collapsed that cost, and a business that could never justify a production budget can now get an ad made.

The Bottleneck Moved to the Creative

Cheaper, faster video solved the supply problem. It did not, on its own, solve the quality one.

Travis Flood, Executive Director of Insights at Comcast Advertising, watches small and social-first brands run into that wall as they reach for the credibility of television. "You want to get into CTV. But what would my commercial be?" he says. "We've always had that challenge... connect them with a production group. They've had to take 30, 60, 90 days to produce it. It's a long process." Take away the cost and the ninety days, and a question still sits there: what is the commercial actually going to say?

For a lot of local advertisers, the creative they can afford still looks like what it is, functional and forgettable. Meanwhile the national brand in the next pod is telling a story. Both ran in the same break. Only one gave anyone a reason to look up. That divide between local and national creative has held for decades, and it's the real thing left to close.

What Closes the Gap

Matt Freedman, Multi Market Digital Sales Manager at TEGNA, has had a front-row seat as streaming opened premium inventory to local brands. He's direct about where the leverage now sits. "The technology is so great now. The targeting is so good. Streaming delivers such an engaged audience," he says. "But if you don't have the right message in front of them, then that's sort of all going to waste." Reach and targeting are handled. Whether the creative earns a viewer's attention is a separate matter, and a harder one.

The answer that holds up is a story: a spot with a reason to exist that a viewer can feel. Extra motion and polish, on their own, don't supply that. A real story is harder to produce than reach or targeting, and it's where the next generation of creative tools will earn their keep. The advertisers who've been priced out of good storytelling for years finally have the access. Handing them the story, at a budget that was never meant to buy one, is the gap worth closing. Creative has become the center of gravity for ad platforms, and for advertisers long shut out of good storytelling, that shift is the opening.

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You Got Them on TV. Now Make Them Worth Watching.

Local advertisers can finally afford to be on TV. The people quoted in this piece mostly agree on what’s still holding them back: the commercial itself. Reach and targeting are in good shape. What most local spots are missing is a reason for anyone to keep watching.

Waymark Cinematic was built to close that gap. It generates stunning story-driven commercials, the kind of creative usually reserved for national brands, on a budget that makes sense for an SMB. Plus, it gives agencies unlimited concept packages to present during pitches, saving countless hours and dollars pursuing advertisers.

On November 4, we’re demoing it publicly for the first time.

Register for the Waymark Cinematic Event

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