Local TV advertising has long been built around a core concept: reach. An advertiser buys a spot against a program or daypart, then the commercial goes out to the audience watching at that moment.
In 2026, that model remains hugely valuable, but it sits alongside a digital advertising economy where buyers have grown used to defining audiences more precisely and following campaigns across different screens.
Advanced advertising is beginning to change that relationship.
In simple terms, broadcasters can make parts of their inventory addressable and automate more of the buying process, while streaming and connected TV (CTV) create room for formats beyond the familiar 30-second spot.
Better measurement naturally also gives advertisers a clearer view of who they reached and, importantly, what happened next. TV and digital ad models essentially become mixed.
Hearst Television is already putting this new model into practice. At WLWT Cincinnati, selected inventory can be replaced at the household level for eligible viewers reached through an integrated multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) partner, giving advertisers a more targeted way into a traditional local broadcast environment.
The technology has begun to move from concept to deployment; the harder work now lies in extending that reach and making the various systems behind it function as one coherent market. To make sense of advanced ads, TV Tech spoke to executives across the TV stack.
Local TV Gets Personal
For a local advertiser, the appeal of addressability is fairly simple: a business may want TV’s reach and premium environment without paying to cover every household in a market.
At WLWT, Hearst identifies specific inventory for replacement and sends the required SCTE signaling into a workflow shared with Viamedia and an MVPD distribution partner.
Viamedia’s ad-decisioning technology, Parrot ADS, can then insert a different commercial for an eligible household, while viewers outside the addressable footprint continue to see the original linear spot.
“We are still early, but we like what we are seeing from a performance standpoint,” John Robertson, vice president of distribution at Hearst Television, said. Based on its experience at WLWT, Hearst said the dynamic ad-insertion capability could unlock an increase of up to 25% in monetizable impressions.
Robertson is also cautious about reading too much into the deployment at this stage, saying there is not yet enough impression volume to draw broader conclusions around demand or pricing.
For Viamedia.ai, the audience comes first. Its president and chief strategy officer, Evan Rutchik, said advertisers can begin with viewers they want to reach, using demographic or geographic signals alongside first-party data where appropriate.
A car dealer, for example, could concentrate spend around its local customer base, while a healthcare provider can focus on communities close to its locations. “The point is not to make the audience as narrow as possible,” Rutchik said, but to give advertisers more control over who they reach while retaining TV’s scale.
Sinclair is exploring another route into advanced local advertising.
In June, Sinclair announced a strategic investment in IRCODE, a company specializing in computer vision and AI aimed at making television interactive and shoppable. It also set plans to roll out IRCODE Lens at stations in Salt Lake City and Austin, Texas, using station apps and image recognition to connect what viewers see on TV with interactive content and commerce. Sinclair’s ONE Media Technologies also included dynamic ad insertion in the test program for its June ATSC 3.0 interoperability event.
For Hearst, scaling household addressability will require a wider footprint. “We need greater scale across MVPDs and eventually vMVPDs,” Robertson said. Hearst also wants better ways to forecast and price the addressable share of a linear unit.
Ultimately, measurement has to value both sides of the break—the households receiving an addressable replacement and the linear audience that remains. For now, household-level targeting remains available across selected parts of the local TV audience, rather than the whole market.
From Spots to Audiences
Hearst said its addressable inventory can already be bought directly or programmatically, with the same basic aim of reaching specific households inside a local market.
As campaigns spread across linear TV and streaming, measurement becomes harder to keep consistent. Buyers need to understand how many people they reached and how often, even when those impressions were delivered through different distribution paths.
Local TV adds another complication, with markets varying hugely in size and audiences spread across different viewing routes.
The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement and the Television Bureau of Advertising addressed some of those issues in new local TV and video currency guidelines, released in May. The framework calls for measurement that reflects the different ways viewers access local TV and video and works across markets of different sizes. It also says services used for transactions should be reliable enough to support forecasting and guarantees, with their methodology and limitations clearly disclosed.
“Fragmentation is one of the biggest challenges in television advertising today,” Viamedia’s Rutchik said. Different environments can use their own technology and reporting, leaving advertisers to reconcile campaigns after the fact.
Viamedia is trying to apply a common decisioning and audience framework across different types of inventory, although Rutchik acknowledged that the underlying technical differences remain.
Yospace sees a similar problem at device level, where broadcasters need measurement to work across CTV players with very different capabilities, including environments they do not control.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is also working to give the market a shared language. Its draft Redefining Media Types framework classifies video environments around the viewing experience and operational signals in an attempt to make planning and measurement more consistent as older distinctions between TV and digital video become harder to apply.
— Max Slater-Robins
Making that kind of buying routine calls for a different commercial setup behind the screen. Linear and digital inventory have traditionally been planned and fulfilled through separate systems, even as viewers move between broadcast TV and internet streaming.
Dan Walsh, senior vice president of product management at Imagine Communications, said his customers have largely accepted the case for convergence. The focus now is on how to make it happen.
“The technology is ready,” he said. “But it requires both advertisers and broadcasters to start shifting from a spot-based mindset and toward an audience-based solution.”
Imagine still sees limits to how much inventory broadcasters should hand to programmatic platforms. Walsh argues automation works particularly well for inventory that direct sales struggle to monetize, while premium spots can remain under tighter control. “The key metric is profit; optimizing both revenue and cost,” he said.
For local buyers, Walsh says automation could also reduce the cost and complexity of direct sales, opening TV to businesses that might otherwise avoid it.
The same convergence is reaching the back office. Operative’s recent platform launch combines advertising and broadcast management with agentic workflow tools that entered beta in September, with wider availability planned for December.
Beyond the 30-Second Spot
Streaming is creating more room to sell ads outside of the traditional TV break.
Yospace said it stitched 11.57 billion one-to-one ads into live streams during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, including 13 million in a 2-minute window at the start of halftime during the England-Norway match.
Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI) is one route into a more flexible streaming environment, separating ad delivery from the main content stream while retaining server-side guidance.
Yospace’s recently launched Ad Presentation solution is designed to support pause-screen ads, overlays, squeeze-backs and L-banners across both server-side ad insertion (SSAI) and SGAI workflows.
“Pause ads have already gained meaningful traction because they create an ad opportunity when the viewer has already chosen to pause the content,” said Paul Davies, head of marketing at Yospace.
IAB Tech Lab finalized signaling guidance for its CTV Ad Portfolio in July, while Warner Bros. Discovery used its 2026 upfront to unveil shoppable pause ads and dynamic creative that can respond to the scene immediately before the break.
Creating Enough Ads
More precise targeting also creates a practical production problem: Advertisers may need far more versions of the same campaign.
Broadcast technology company ENCO Systems said generative AI is one way to make that manageable, especially for local businesses that lack the budget or resources for traditional video production.
ENCO President Ken Frommert said AI is already changing the sales process. “We have customers using SPECai to analyze an advertiser’s website and create a spec spot before they ever walk through the door,” he said. SPOTai extends the concept into video, making it easier to produce finished commercials and alternate versions.
“The more precisely advertising can be targeted, the less sense it makes for every audience to receive exactly the same creative,” he said. Frommert expects demand for versioning to grow, while keeping human approval in the workflow before anything goes to air.
Making Advanced Advertising Work at Scale
Advanced advertising is moving closer to the everyday business of local TV.
Hearst’s WLWT deployment shows household-level replacement working in a real market, and the wider industry is making audience-based buying and newer streaming formats easier to use.
The pace of adoption will depend on wider distribution support and the development of common standards. Broadcasters also need measurement that can follow campaigns across the viewing paths advertisers increasingly treat as one market.
“Addressable television really reaches scale when advertisers stop having to think of it as a specialized product,” Rutchik said.
That may be the clearest marker of where the market is heading. Once the machinery can disappear into the background, the shift from spots to audiences becomes part of the normal business of local TV.
