There's been a massive creative gap between local and national advertisers on TV for decades. GenAI is closing it.

Every creative problem in a local advertiser's campaign starts with a lackluster asset library.

A logo they commissioned in 2019.
A folder on Facebook their employees and customers have contributed to.
That set of photos from a freelance photographer that they’ve been reusing for everything from site images to social media posts. 

For as long as local businesses have been running television ads, those thin asset libraries have acted as a ceiling for both their campaign and the imagination and expectations of the advertiser.  

Testing a campaign against three audiences requires enough raw material to build three spots that don't look like the same. A fall push needs footage that looks like fall. Extending a broadcast buy onto CTV and social relies on assets that adapt to a new aspect ratio and a much larger screen.

We call these money problems, but  they're actually supply problems. The advertiser isn't short on budget for a second flight. They're short on things to show.

You can spot it in the finished work. When an advertiser's own material can't fill thirty seconds, stock fills the rest. A generic family at a generic dinner table. It may be clean and cleared for broadcast, but it belongs to nobody. 

This gap between an advertiser's creative library and what is expected on the big screen is well documented. Ad World News reported in March that local businesses across categories—car dealerships, medical practices, restaurants—routinely lack CTV-ready creative, and that the shortage blocks sales even when the inventory is sitting unsold.

That branded footage gap is one that local advertisers can’t close on their own. 

For a local advertiser spending a few thousand a month across every channel, one production day to fill out a thin library can cost more than a quarter of media. The published range for a traditional commercial runs from $10,000 to $500,000. 

Ad World News laid out the trap in May: local service providers who could comfortably cover about $5,000 in media were looking at five-figure production bills, so they skipped television entirely.

This is why so many conversations stall for no obvious reason. The advertiser likes the audience case. They have the money. Then the production quote lands, the math falls apart, and the deal slides to the next quarter. 

AI Capabilities Are Turning the Tides for Local Creative 

Advancements in AI photo and video technology are making it possible to expand an advertiser’s asset library using content they’ve been sitting on for years. 

There are three AI technologies we’re seeing become more common to achieve this: 

Image to Video 

By bringing static photos to life, image-to-video technology delivers a game-changing impact for advertisers with sparse video resources. A basic two-second slow zoom can quickly become a genuine, branded clip.

It’s the difference between an ad that feels like a slideshow and an ad full of authentic moments of footage captured and owned by the advertiser themselves. Plus, it requires no new shoots. 

Image to Image

Image to image makes it easy to change the context of an existing photo and create new imagery while staying true to the brand. Same building, same signage, same brand, and a different picture every time you need one. 

Advertisers running seasonal campaigns benefit immensely from the flexibility this technology offers, updating images they already own to fit the theme of a campaign without needing to schedule and pay for reshoots. 

AI Upscaling

‍Through AI upscaling, low-resolution imagery is transformed into high-quality, broadcast-ready assets.
Frequently, an advertiser’s most authentic visual content comes directly from their employees and customers.

With AI Upscaling, even a five-year-old iPhone photo can be repurposed into an effective asset for a local TV campaign. 

Deeper Asset Libraries Change the Media Sales Conversation

"What do you have?" used to be a qualifying question in disguise.

It sorted advertisers into the ones you could build a campaign for and the ones you couldn't, and it capped how much of your local market you could serve. The new question is “what do you want to show?” 

For agencies, pitching creative used to mean eating the cost of spec work, or describing the idea and hoping the advertiser could picture it. Now the pitch is the work itself, built from the advertiser's own assets, before anyone signs anything.

Platforms run into a different version of the same problem. The long tail of local advertisers stalls at the creative step, well before the media step. Inventory sits unsold because nobody can make the ad to fill it. Close that gap, and the addressable base grows without a single new inventory deal. 

On the sales side, it changes the shape of the account. Renewals get easier when AEs can refresh existing creative instead of rerunning it. They can sell four seasonal flights to an advertiser who used to have one look a year. 

The Local Creative Ceiling Was a Production Problem All Along.

Thin libraries are what's left when a production model prices somebody out of building an asset base, then puts them up against brands that already have one. It's a supply problem, and it always was.

That model is coming apart, and the change is already available. Your advertiser's folder has more in it than they think. 

Creative shouldn't be the reason a local advertiser looks smaller than they are.

We're taking that apart live on Wednesday, September 30 at 12:00 PM ET: how to put stronger, story-led concepts in the room earlier, how to build more from the assets an advertiser already has, and how to get to video polished enough that nobody has to make allowances for it. Our creative team is also unveiling new premium AI video features built to close that quality gap across the whole funnel.

Save your seat to the webinar, register today.