By Jenn Scilabro, Chief Growth Officer at Ribeye
It’s no secret that local media is under pressure.
Over the past two decades, the number of local journalists in the United States has declined sharply, with communities everywhere suffering from increasingly limited coverage. The advertising ecosystem that supports that journalism is facing a similar strain: unpredictable revenue, tight margins, and media consolidation are all forcing teams to operate with fewer and fewer resources.
In this environment, decisions about technology carry more weight than ever. Most local organizations I talk to operate across systems they’ve accumulated over time, an OMS here, one or more DSP relationships there, and separate reporting platforms layered in between. Each solution solved a problem at some point, but none were actually designed to work together.
Still, many teams stick with what they have for good reasons. Changing a stack takes time, retraining, and can introduce operational risk. When campaigns are active and margins are tight, stability often wins.
But over time, the tradeoffs become harder to ignore. Reporting requires constant reconciliation. Campaigns run through multiple partners with limited visibility into spend and fees. Sellers spend more time navigating systems than working with clients, and operations teams are forced to optimize channel by channel instead of at the campaign level.
The question isn’t whether change will be a challenge — it usually is! It’s whether the current inefficiencies are sustainable. Here’s how to assess your stack and decide.
Three steps for rethinking the local stack
Start with revenue reporting
When reviewing a stack, the first step is to gain economic clarity. Where applicable, this can include:
- Mapping the path of advertiser dollars from booking through execution to final reporting
- Identifying embedded take rates and overlapping platform costs
- Estimating the operational hours required to reconcile systems each month
- Modeling the financial effects of incremental efficiency gains
Grounding evaluation in measurable impact ensures that any change will connect directly to financial outcomes.
Document your workflow
Next, trace a transaction from order entry to reporting delivery, documenting where data and process flows smoothly and where manual intervention is necessary.
As you do so, be sure to note which partnerships are supplemental. Next, identify which contracts come with “ad taxes” or operational costs, and which protect your margins. From there, distinguish foundational infrastructure from bolt-ons that may no longer serve their original purpose or that have become duplicative.
This exercise often surfaces complexity that’s hidden by routines or band-aides. It also tends to clarify the problems you want your partners to address. Without that clarity, discussions could drift toward feature comparisons or pricing snapshots (and surprises down the line) instead of improvements to your workflows.
Evaluate potential partners
When your conversations with prospective partners eventually begin, it’s important to focus on structure and economics.
Here’s what to ask vendors out of the gate:
- How do advertiser dollars flow through your platform, and where are fees applied?
- How is pricing structured, and what portion of spend goes to working media?
- What margin improvement can we expect, and what assumptions is that based on?
- How is inventory sourced, and what visibility do we have into where ads run?
- How are campaigns managed across channels, and how is optimization handled?
- What level of support is included (pre-sale, sales enablement, AdOps)?
- What will change operationally for our team, and which tools can be consolidated?
- What resources are required during onboarding, and how long to reach steady state?
- What level of data access and integration do we have?
Clear answers to these questions matter more than any demo, as they’ll reveal how the potential partner will handle your business in practice.
Making the call with clarity
Changing a tech stack requires time and coordination. Keeping your current one carries ongoing operational and margin implications. Both are real. That’s why it’s worth asking: If migration requires several months of adjustment, what does that cost? And if the current inefficiencies were to persist for years, what would that cost?
These are questions for leadership, not vendors. Asking them will bring discipline to the conversation and keep the focus on long-term sustainability, regardless of the direction you ultimately take.
The goal should never be to pursue change for its own sake, but to make the choice that best supports your organization’s stability and long-term health. A clear-eyed look at the economics of your stack will make that decision easier to stand behind.
