What Local Broadcasters Can Teach Adtech About Trust
If you’ve spent any time in local media, you know that trust isn’t built in a dashboard. It’s built by showing up. Broadcasters earn this trust the old-fashioned way: They live in the same communities they serve, walk into businesses when things go right (and when things go wrong), and they definitely don’t hide behind three layers of email or a platform ticket queue.
Advertisers and viewers both feel that. And when people trust the messenger, the brands benefit, too. It’s the original “attribution model,” which never required a technical explanation.
Meanwhile, in today’s adtech ecosystem, trust has become harder to sustain. Sellers are bouncing between fragmented tools, unclear inventory paths, and automation that often creates more blind spots than clarity. And as CTV matures, with heavier scrutiny on frequency, attribution, and audience quality, the trust gap between platforms and local advertisers is only widening. Advertisers don’t just want better impressions; they want to believe what they’re being told.
The upside? Adtech can take a cue from local media and get back to the basics: presence, transparency, and consistency.
Learning to show up
Instead of waiting for an insertion order, Local sellers show up when a storm hits, a business slows, a competitor launches a promotion, and when an advertiser needs help understanding what’s actually happening inside their campaign.
These sellers also monitor pacing early, shift budgets when needed, prepare for seasonality, and check in during key business periods. It’s these tiny but meaningful touches that build something technology can’t on its own: confidence.
Of course, nobody expects a national adtech company to meet SMBs at the local coffee shop. But presence can still be felt. This means offering clearer signals, informative alerts, and proactive communication. In other words, they need to provide support that sticks around — not just when something is sold, but when something needs attention.
Rethinking transparency and the customer experience
My 30 years of local media experience taught me that trust is built through simple habits that are consistently and well executed. Five stand out:
- Translate complexity into business outcomes
- Maintain continuity instead of resetting relationships each quarter
- Flag issues early so sellers can manage expectations with confidence
- Listen before recommending
- Customize for the realities of each market
Adtech can do most of these today, and with the right data, even customization is within reach. But the truth is this: trust can still break down long before the impression is served, often at the point where local teams run into systems that weren’t built for how they work.
Understanding where adtech misses local reality
If you’ve worked in local long enough, you start to see patterns. One of the biggest that I’ve come across is that moment when a local advertiser needs something that isn’t “standard,” which is often when adtech reveals its blind spots.
Here are a few anonymized real-world moments that say it all:
- The auto dealer who deeded a message change…today. A dealer calls at 8 AM. Weekend traffic dipped. The competitor launched a new offer. They need a same-day creative swap and tighter ZIP targeting. Local teams pivot in hours…platforms often can’t. Automation doesn’t understand urgency, but local advertisers always operate inside it.
- The HVAC advertiser who didn’t meet the platform minimum. A small home services client wants a $2,500 county-level CTV buy ahead of the first cold snap. Platform minimum: $5K + targeting restrictions. To the platform, this is “policy.” To the advertiser, it’s: “You don’t understand how my business spends money.” And the deal walks.
- The mom-and-pop retailer who gets a 40-page report. Impressions, reach, frequency, IP conversions, pixel-fire diagnostics are all perfectly valid KPIs — just not to the local bakery owner reading it. Their real question: “Is my store busier?” Where local sellers translate, platforms often assume that translation isn’t needed.
Issues like these aren’t rare; in fact, they’re systemic and predictable. They also point to the same truth: most adtech was built for scale, then only later adapted for local without a true sense of how those teams operate.
And these realities matter due to lean teams, high accountability, fast-moving advertisers, ZIP-driven insights, and seasonal economics. In other words, it’s human relationships that outlast the platforms. When technology can align with these dynamics, local sellers will be quicker to use and champion it.
A new era of local-style trust
At the local level, technology only matters if people trust the output. Sellers need partners who understand where they’ve been, anticipate what’s coming, and give them information they can stand behind in a client meeting.
If adtech wants to rebuild confidence, it starts with translating complexity, maintaining continuity, flagging issues early, listening deeply, and customizing solutions to fit local realities.
Do this, and trust will grow. Ignore it, and you’ll remain just another platform in a sea of platforms.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Ribeye. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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