As brands navigate a world of fragmented viewing habits, evolving identity signals, and increasing demands for automation and AI, local media has emerged as a powerful, outcomes-driven way to reach audiences where they live and make decisions. Enter LocalX.
That complexity is at the heart of the recent Ad Age Marketer’s Brief episode featuring Zach Mullins, Chief Strategy Officer at Locality, who unpacked why the company built their LocalX platform to simplify planning, buying, and measuring local TV and streaming so marketers can activate with confidence and scale in an increasingly fragmented ecosystem.
Purpose-built for local, Locality’s LocalX platform centralizes planning, buying, and measurement across streaming media into a single, intelligent workflow, giving advertisers a clear view of performance while helping them move faster and act with confidence.
The conversation was clear: the next era of local advertising belongs to the platforms that bring clarity, data, and purpose to an increasingly complex environment.
Simplifying an Increasingly Complex Landscape
Local advertising has always been effective, but it hasn’t always been simple. Today’s environment is highly fragmented; spanning multiple platforms, inventory sources, DSPs, CRM tools, and measurement systems. Planning campaigns across local markets only increases that complexity and advertisers often find themselves piecing together data and workflows manually.
“What we identified was a need to pull together all of these multiple systems,” Mullins explained. “There’s omni-channel inventory, walled gardens, direct inventory sources, and more, and then we need to layer in measurement on top of that. All of these different individual components have to come together and work properly.”
LocalX solves that fragmentation, allowing advertisers and agencies to plan, buy, optimize and measure in one platform. As Mullins explains, it merges planning, workflow, insights, and outcomes “so advertisers and agencies can go faster and leverage AI, data, and tools to help pull the pieces together and work more efficiently and effectively.”
By centralizing the full campaign lifecycle, LocalX streamlines execution while unlocking a smarter way to understand and act on campaign performance.
Turning Data Into Actionable Intelligence
LocalX was built with flexibility in mind. Campaigns can vary dramatically: some rely on a single inventory source, while others may span streaming, local broadcast, vMVPDs, and more. For every campaign, LocalX provides a transparent view across impressions, reach, frequency, performance, and market-level insights. Advertisers see what’s working, why it’s working, and can make decisions in real time.
Locality’s deep experience in both broadcast and streaming across all DMAs is embedded directly into the platform. Communities in New York don’t look like those in Montana. Differences in audience behavior, content preferences, and viewing habits are accounted for, allowing advertisers to tailor creative and messaging to specific markets. As Mullins explained, “Customizing the creative to resonate more closely with the local market…helps point back to creating more effectiveness for the ad delivery.”
Integrated measurement – including ACR-powered insights – adds a layer of accountability that helps advertisers understand cross-platform impact. Instead of fragmented snapshots, LocalX provides a complete picture of local campaign performance.
Purpose-Built for Local – Not Retro-Fitted
Most planning platforms were originally designed for national campaigns and later adapted for local targeting. LocalX flipped the script. “It’s purpose-built for local…we built LocalX from the ground up,” Mullins noted.
This local-first design shows up in three ways:
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- Audience and market insights: Understanding how people behave within individual DMAs.
- Premium inventory access: From streaming publishers and vMVPDs to local news, live sports, and OEMs
- Integrated measurement: Unified cross-screen reporting that reflects the full impact of every impression.
By unifying insights, inventory and measurement, into one workflow, LocalX delivers more consistent and actionable outcomes for advertisers.
The Future of Local Advertising
With local video at the core of Locality’s business, Mullins outlined a future defined by automation, AI-driven insights, and simplified planning and execution at scale.
“We’re excited about our first phase of automated line-item generation available in the system today, and we’re seeing some great commercials produced from a fully AI-powered creative studio natively built into the platform,” he said. The next step is deepening these capabilities so advertisers can turn richer insights into faster, smarter decisions.
LocalX’s mission is simple: make local media easier to buy, manage and produce extraordinary campaigns. “Inherently, local can be complex,” Mullins said. “There are a lot of nuances in communities across the country and to figure out how to target your ad the right way in each can become very burdensome, very fast. To be able to do that at scale – and well – that’s the future LocalX looks to power.”
Bringing It All Together
The conversation with Mullins underscored a broader industry trend: local advertising is no longer just about media placement. It’s about orchestrating data, insights, and execution across platforms and media channels to drive real outcomes in local communities.
LocalX exemplifies that approach, giving advertisers and agencies the tools to plan, buy, and measure campaigns with clarity and confidence. By unifying fragmented systems, providing local-first intelligence, and enabling scalable execution, Locality is helping redefine the future of local advertising.
For more on Locality’s approach to local media, visit Locality.com or the LocalX platform.
