By Ribeye Founder & CEO Joe Marino
Spend a day inside any broadcaster or media sales organization and you’ll see an extraordinary amount of effort poured into simply making the machinery run. On paper, selling modern media should be easier than ever. In practice, it’s become a daily exercise in managing fragmentation.
To build even a single campaign for a local advertiser, teams must navigate a long list of platforms: GAM for one piece, FreeWheel for another, an attribution partner for measurement, a visualization platform for reporting, direct publishers for supply access, one or more DSPs for digital channels, Google Ads for search, Meta for social. Then come specialized vendors for email, data enrichment, or niche formats. What should be a coherent workflow becomes a patchwork: an ever-growing constellation of tools, contracts, and manual processes that barely hold together.
This isn’t the result of poor leadership or outdated thinking. It’s the logical outcome of a market that grew by one channel, one tool, and one vendor at a time. Every time a new opportunity emerges, such as CTV, DOOH, and new forms of audience targeting, broadcasters do what they’ve always done: find a partner, bolt on a workflow, and push forward. That creates momentum, but it also creates weight.
Eventually, every broadcaster reaches the same epiphany: This is too fragmented. We can’t scale like this. Something has to change.
That moment often arrives during economic pressure or operational strain. Leadership looks across a sprawling stack, sees inefficiency and redundancy, and begins consolidating. Canceling vendors, reducing headcount, searching for a platform that can help bring order to the chaos. Such consolidation can solve short-term pain, but it comes with a tradeoff. Most “unifying” platforms enforce rigid workflows designed for enterprise scale, not local flexibility. Broadcasters end up contorting their businesses to fit the tool, rather than benefiting from a tool shaped around their businesses.
This happens because local broadcasters were never meant to operate inside a system built from national logic. Their markets behave differently. Their advertisers behave differently. Their revenue mix, timelines, margins, and expectations all differ from national agencies or enterprise buyers. Yet the tools available to them often assume a level of standardization that simply doesn’t exist in local ad sales.
Local teams know their markets better than anyone. They know the automotive dealer who’s been advertising for twenty years, the restaurant franchisee making decisions store by store, the healthcare provider that needs to reach a five-mile radius. These relationships are the heart of local media. No system should diminish that. The next phase of modernization must protect that edge, not flatten it.
But preserving the local advantage doesn’t mean preserving the local workflow. In fact, the biggest threat to broadcasters today isn’t competition from tech giants. It’s the operational drag of managing too many disconnected systems. Sellers spend more time toggling between platforms than meeting with clients. Ad ops becomes the unofficial glue holding together tools that don’t naturally fit. Reporting cycles grow longer not because insights are complicated, but because assembling them is.
Meanwhile, digital competitors like Google, Amazon, Meta, and the self-serve platforms aimed directly at small advertisers operate with extraordinary efficiency. They deliver speed, automation, and clarity that local teams simply can’t match with a fragmented stack. And local clients have noticed. They increasingly expect the same level of immediacy, transparency, and simplicity.
The path forward requires a shift in mindset: from bolting on tools to building coherent systems; from reactive workflows to intentional architecture; from fragmented processes to unified execution.
Unification doesn’t mean stripping away the channels or partners that make local media valuable. It means giving broadcasters the infrastructure to bring those pieces together in a way that finally matches the complexity of their business. It means centralizing planning, buying, optimization, and reporting that make the choices manageable. It means creating room for sellers to actually sell again, instead of acting as part-time operations managers.
A unified, modernized stack for broadcasters should enable one thing above all:
- The ability to run every channel and workflow in one coordinated environment, so teams can redirect time and energy back to clients rather than logistics.
That’s the transformation local media needs. Not another layer or another workaround, but a foundation that respects the demands of modern advertising and the realities of local.
Broadcasters aren’t searching for a silver bullet. They’re searching for a path out of fragmentation. A way to maintain their local edge while operating with digital-era efficiency. A way to scale the thousands of small but meaningful campaigns that fuel their business without burning out their teams.
The next phase of local ad sales won’t involve chasing the newest channel or adopting the latest acronym. It calls for unified systems that honor what broadcasters do best: serve their communities, their advertisers, and their markets with expertise no national platform can replicate.
Fragmentation was the first era. Unification must be the next.
