How local advertisers are breaking through in a fragmented media landscape

While fragmentation continues to challenge local advertisers, the industry is rallying around smarter, more scalable solutions — a theme that continues to come through strongly in conversations, including at Cannes Lions. Much of the discourse is centered on channels that are especially relevant to local advertisers, including streaming video and audio.

“It’s a tough environment, especially for businesses with regional focus and limited budgets,” said Jenn Donohue, director local ad sales, Amazon Ads. “They want scale, clarity and results — not complexity. It’s all about simplifying the process and driving better outcomes.”

How advertisers are coordinating local reach with streaming video and audio campaigns

Through digital and streaming options, video and audio advertising have become both more accessible and measurable for local brands. This efficacy is echoed by the findings from a recent Digiday and Amazon Ads survey in which local streaming TV ads accounted for at least 41% of annual revenue for a majority of marketers. And with the help of technology and innovative partners, local advertisers are incorporating streaming TV into scalable, cohesive cross-platform strategies.

For instance, when streaming TV is paired with other channels, such as audio, local advertisers are better able to deliver unified and targeted experiences. Radio has long been an integral part of the media mix for regional advertisers. Not only is broadcast radio reach higher than it was 20 years ago, but data also shows that audio drives performance when added to other media such as streaming TV, increasing reach by 81 percent. Additionally, media companies like iHeartMedia offer advertisers targeting, measurement and attribution for both broadcast radio and streaming.

In one case, Apollo Home, a home improvement company, partnered with iHeartMedia and Amazon Ads on a regional, full-funnel strategy. The campaign spanned radio and real-time weather and traffic audio; streaming TV on Amazon Prime Video and iHeart; and a small, consistent broadcast TV presence. AI-driven optimization and advanced measurement capabilities connected upper-funnel exposure with lower-funnel outcomes. The results exceeded targets, including a 46% reduction in acquisition cost and a 27% increase in conversion rate, demonstrating the power of combining streaming TV with audio.

Sports — particularly regional and college teams — also offer local advertisers valuable opportunities in the increasingly coveted live media environment. To gain deeper insights into viewers of live entertainment, including Thursday Night Football, Amazon Ads and Omnicom are working together to connect a fragmented measurement and planning environment into a more consolidated one. This partnership, announced at this year’s Cannes Lions, takes an essential integrated approach at a time when 62% of marketers struggle to measure impact across channels.

As local advertisers work to connect the dots across channels, emerging tech may offer a solution.

Generative AI and automation help local advertisers fast-track growth

AI is set up to be a significant advertising growth driver — especially for local advertisers who need to punch above their weight. Now these marketers are rolling up their sleeves and finding ways to incorporate it into their workflows.

As Digiday reported, much of the chatter at Cannes fixated on AI’s ability to generate content faster or reduce production costs. The bigger shift is how AI is being used to gain competitive and operational advantage, changing how decisions are made, how media is allocated and how campaigns perform.

For local advertisers in particular, generative AI helps condense extensive workflows of creative design, insight generation and customer targeting into weeks or even days, often with at-scale personalization and automated iterative testing. 

According to McKinsey, one European telecommunications company used generative AI to shift from highly manual customer outreach messaging to hyperpersonalized messaging for 150 specific segments, accounting for each segment’s demographic, region, dialect and other attributes. The result was a 40% lift in response rates and a 25% reduction in deployment costs.

AI-powered optimization is one key application powering results like this, as AWS and Amazon DSP automate and enhance campaign relevance based on unified insights and measurements. And in another boon to local advertisers, generative AI platform streamr.ai revealed a new integration with Google’s Veo 3 model prior to Cannes. The integration allows its small- and medium-sized business clients to deliver studio-grade streaming TV creative — including AI-driven scripts, voiceovers, visuals and brand customization — at scale.

Amazon Ads also revealed enhancements to its AI-powered Video Generator tool at Cannes. The tool enables advertisers to create realistic, high-motion product shots, transform still images into motion in a single click and offer more creative options for brands of all sizes.

“Our journey with generative AI for advertising began with Image Generator, which simplified still image creation,” said Jay Richman, VP, product and technology at Amazon Ads. “We then expanded to Video Generator, which transformed how advertisers could create motion content. Now, with this enhanced version of Video Generator, available to all U.S. Amazon Ads customers, we’re taking another significant leap forward in creative capabilities — all while maintaining the simplicity that makes these tools accessible to advertisers of all sizes.”

Local market insights enable precise targeting and creative optimization

Instrumental to the success of cross-channel campaigns — and the effectiveness of AI-powered optimization — is precise data, such as the trillions of signals gleaned from browsing, shopping and streaming behavior across the Amazon Ads ecosystem. 

TV ad buying is increasingly driven by ad tech, a common theme across the stages of Cannes, the Upfronts and other high-profile industry moments this year. This underscores the importance of partnerships for local advertisers leveraging the channel to hyperfocus their spending across key parameters — geography, of course, but also other demo- and psychographics. 

Local and national advertisers alike are able to activate cross-channel campaigns through the Amazon DSP, using its signals to deliver consistent messaging, implement better frequency control and access shared measurement.

To further maximize the impact and relevance of these shopper signals, Amazon Ads is combining them with the hyperlocal viewership insights of its partner Spectrum Reach. While both offer advertisers premium inventory, Spectrum Reach is unique for its extensive local market presence. 

“Amazon Ads brings premium content — Thursday Night Football, Lord of the Rings, only available on Prime Video — deep signals and engaged viewership with the lowest churn rate on non-skippable ads,” Donohue said. “Spectrum Reach brings local expertise, creative agility and real-time insights. Together, we offer efficiency without compromise — fewer wasted impressions, more meaningful impact.” 

When the first-party signals from Amazon Ads and Spectrum Reach are paired in a privacy-focused way, it enables precise targeting and more accurate measurement in a brand-safe environment for local advertisers. These strategies, which were a focal point of Amazon Ads’ and Spectrum Reach’s conversations at Cannes, create even more opportunities for local advertisers to deploy efficient and impactful campaigns.

For instance, Renewal by Andersen tapped Amazon Ads and Spectrum Reach to identify prime targets in five zip codes. The combination of Amazon Ads’ signals and Spectrum Reach’s data-driven tools analyzed viewership and geographic data in the desired areas, identifying 300,000 new consumers to reach through premium video advertising. The brand was able to scale the strategy quickly and is expanding this approach to every business zip code in 2025. 

Another local advertiser, Paramount Automotive, partnered with Spectrum Reach to engage households in the market to purchase a vehicle. The campaign used Spectrum Reach’s privacy-focused first-party data to inform the creative and optimized campaign execution based on performance metrics. The campaign resulted in a 30% growth in market share year over year, as well as expansion to three additional locations. Its success demonstrated that effective storytelling is about relevance as much as it is about reach.

“At Spectrum Reach, our approach is rooted in simplicity, ensuring that businesses of all sizes can easily connect with their ideal customers,” said Michael Guth, SVP, marketing at Spectrum Reach. “By pairing our household-level viewership insights with Amazon Ads’ shopper signals, we help brands move beyond broad targeting into real audience behavior — local, actionable and effective. 

“It’s not just about reaching more people,” he said. “It’s about reaching the right people, with the right message, at the right time.”

Even out-of-home — a channel that contributes to both brand-building and performance goals and has long aided local advertisers with its place-bound positioning — is leaning on data for optimization. At Cannes, Outfront’s demo of XLabs — a unit behind new, mostly transit-related digital OOH executions — showcased campaigns with dynamic data-driven creative, often geared around weather data.

Local trends will continue to influence marketing strategy, and even larger brands aim to create emotionally resonant localized campaigns, as evidenced by discussions from PepsiCo, WARC and more on the Croisette.

Despite their small teams and even smaller budgets, local advertisers are demonstrating that — with the support of AI, automation and rich signals — targeted, cross-channel strategies can deliver measurable results. By tapping into the right partnerships and prioritizing scalable personalization, regional marketers are simplifying complex ad ecosystems and driving meaningful growth.

Sponsored by Amazon Ads