Keith Kazerman, President of Streaming at Locality discusses the latest technologies impacting programmatic advertising and how this will influence ad buying behaviors in this chat with MarTech Series:

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Hi Keith, tell us more about yourself and your role at Locality?

At Locality, as president of streaming, my focus is on helping advertisers meet their evolving needs by leveraging the power of local advertising to deliver the most relevant audiences. I lead strategies across sales, product, research, operations, and publisher development to ensure we are constantly enhancing our solutions and maximizing the impact for our clients. My goal is to continuously push the boundaries of local advertising, combining the precision of digital media with the reach of broadcast to offer unparalleled targeting capabilities.

We’d love to hear more about your Locality Reach+ streaming solution: how does it enable end users from marketing and advertising teams?

Locality’s Reach+ streaming solution simplifies local video ad campaigns for marketing and advertising teams by unifying ad buying across broadcast and streaming platforms, addressing audience fragmentation, and thereby increasing ad spend effectiveness. It provides access to all U.S. designated market areas (DMAs) through 150+ streaming channels and 400+ local TV stations, maximizing reach and offering precise audience targeting. Reach+ enables brands to optimize their ad spend with better frequency control, delivering personalized, localized campaigns that resonate with market-specific audiences. Its advanced measurement capabilities allow advertisers to track incremental reach, ad effectiveness, and conversions, ensuring improved campaign performance and ROI.

What about today’s state of ad buying needs urgent improvement in your view? Can you throw light on some of the most innovative features being introduced in adtech and martech that are addressing some of today’s ad buying challenges well?

In today’s ad-buying landscape, one of the most pressing issues is the fragmentation between platforms and the ad “waste” that’s cause by the fragmentation. We continue to hear that advertisers are struggling to manage campaigns across multiple mediums—broadcast, streaming, and digital—while maintaining consistency, targeting accuracy, and effective measurement. This complexity often leads to inefficient ad spending and makes it harder for brands to deliver cohesive, effective campaigns. Additionally, the dominance of walled gardens, where major platforms restrict data access, limits advertisers’ ability to obtain a holistic view of their audience across all channels, making informed decision-making even more challenging.

Unified campaign management platforms now enable advertisers to streamline efforts across broadcast and digital channels through a single interface, reducing fragmentation. We’re solving fragmentation with the implementation of Reach+, making it easier for advertisers to flexibly plan, buy, and measure ad campaign effectiveness.

Programmatic local advertising is also advancing, allowing for hyper-local targeting that merges national scale with local relevance. AI-powered targeting and personalization are optimizing ad placements in real time, while cross-channel attribution models and enhanced measurement tools provide more accurate insights into campaign performance, allowing advertisers to allocate their budgets more effectively. These innovations are helping to break down silos, enabling smarter, data-driven ad buying that drives better results.

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With so much online content flooding the screens of digital users today, what should video marketers and video advertisers do to optimize their campaigns?

That’s a great question, and a simple solution. To optimize their campaigns in today’s crowded digital landscape, video marketers and advertisers should prioritize personalization and localization. All buying decisions are made at a local level. When you add in personalization opportunities, it allows brands to deliver highly relevant content tailored to individual users’ preferences, behaviors, and demographics. By leveraging data insights and machine learning, advertisers can craft dynamic video ads that adapt in real time to suit the specific interests of each viewer. This increases engagement and fosters a stronger connection between the brand and the audience, making the ad experience feel more relevant and less intrusive.

Localization is equally important for optimizing video ad performance. By tailoring content to resonate with local audiences, brands can connect on a more personal level with consumers in specific regions or communities. Localized messaging, whether it’s through local language or dialects or highlighting regional issues and interests, helps ensure the ad feels more authentic to its viewers. Combining personalization with localization enables marketers to deliver video content that speaks directly to the viewer’s context, making it more likely to capture attention and drive action.

Can you share a few thoughts on how you’ve been observing AI influence today’s video ad marketplace?

AI is driving creative optimization in video advertising. Through machine learning algorithms, AI can test different ad variations, automatically adjusting elements like video length, visuals, and messaging to optimize performance in real time. This continuous learning process ensures that ads are always being refined to resonate better with viewers. AI is also enabling innovations in content creation itself, from generating video scripts to producing automated, dynamic ads that change based on real-time data. These advancements allow marketers to scale their video efforts without compromising quality or personalization, giving them the tools to stay competitive in a fast-evolving marketplace.

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