From the moment video first appeared on the Internet it was clear that the cable party was living on borrowed time.  If you’ve been around the industry long enough, like I have, watching events unfold is sad, but not a surprise.  What’s been predicted for two decades is now happening, in full bloom, right before our eyes.

However, this is NOT another lament or pile on about the state of the industry.  Quite the opposite, I’m here to make the case for one competitive advantage of the traditional cable business that I believe can continue to be a difference maker, even in the era of the “cable-pocalyse.”  I like to call it cable’s home field advantage.

For those of us old enough to remember, cable started as a local business.  It grew from the bottom up.  Before the era of consolidation, local and regional carriers wired the cities and towns of this country block by block.  They built ad sales teams to monetize the inventory they received as part of their carriage agreements with cable networks like ESPN and TBS. 

Employing a team of experts, who lived and worked in the communities they served, to help local businesses make the most of television, and eventually digital, advertising was a central component of local cable’s value proposition.  It still is today, even as local ad sales teams have shrunk considerably.

As everybody knows, the massive tectonic shifts in media consumption and the dominance of Google, Meta and Amazon have laid waste to the old world of local advertising. 

While cable was built from the grass roots, the tech giants swarmed the market from the top.  They built ad revenue machines that captured near monopolistic levels of share without scaling local ad sales teams.  Technology, the Internet and mobile phones made it easy for any local advertiser to more precisely target consumers and self-serve their own ad campaign.  Having people in the market wasn’t important. 

In the face of such carnage, many analysts and so-called industry experts began dismissing the importance of strong local teams.  Rather than view “boots on the ground” as an asset, they see local personnel as a liability, an excess cost center slowly but surely being rendered obsolete by the march of technology and changing viewing habits.  In the face of shrinking audiences and profit margins, the pressure grows on the executives that run these businesses to cut staff.

In the minds of the cable doom-sayers, “home field advantage” is nothing more than the quaint delusion from a bygone era.  The future of the business is in technology – better ad products and data.

We talked a lot about technology, ad products and data when I ran marketing for two of the largest local cable ad sales divisions in the country.  Granted, I haven’t worked in that part of the business since 2020 so I’m not as close to it as I once was.  But it’s clear that the emphasis on data and products has only intensified, and for good reason.  It is impossible to compete without them. 

No matter what type of advertising your selling, if you can’t demonstrate that you have the technology and data required to maximize the performance of a customer’s campaign, you might as well be repping the yellow pages.

While all that is true, I think those who dismiss the importance of local teams are making a mistake.  Maybe I’m a dinosaur or out of touch with reality, but I believe the industry should not give into to outside pressure and forfeit what’s left of its home field advantage. 

The media landscape is only getting more complex and complicated.  The ability to interact with knowledgeable, living, breathing professionals remains highly differentiating.  And in an era of massive media proliferation, being different, I think, is essential. 

As I said before, access to strong data and technology is table stakes in advertising today.  Without it, you can’t compete.  But because it is so essential, I believe the ability of any ad sales organization to meaningfully differentiate itself in the eyes of advertiser in these areas will become increasingly difficult.

Eventually these consistency and integrations issues will be fixed.  If only because brand marketers are demanding it.  As a result, a sales strategy built on “our data is better than theirs” feels very short term to me.

However, cable’s local presence feels like an advantage with significant runway.  It’s unlikely that the streaming giants, like Roku, Tubi, Amazon and Netflix, will open sales offices in 200+ DMAs.  No question, their inventory is highly desirable to local advertisers, but their sales efforts will be hampered without people in market.  Maybe local isn’t important to them so they won’t care, but that leaves an opening for cable.

Google and Meta have built out teams in many markets, but unlike traditional local cables sales teams, they only sell their products.  What does that mean?  Over the years, out of necessity, local cable ad sales teams forged partnerships across the media landscape, even with the competition, to come to market with a more diverse, expansive portfolio of inventory.  This approach allowed local cable ad sales teams to continue to grow revenue despite their company’s overall decline in cable penetration.

It’s impossible to imagine a Google sales rep ever selling local Facebook or Instagram inventory.  Yet local cable reps sell inventory that belongs to competitors every day.  Yes, the margins on selling repped inventory versus owned are not nearly as attractive, but the nimbleness and flexibility of local cable’s approach offers the opportunity to expand their inventory even further.  In a world where viewing continues to fragment, this feels like a meaningful advantage.

The advent of AI driven technology is another area of opportunity.  For all its potential, AI is confusing as hell.  Businesses large and small are trying to figure out what it means for their futures.  Here again, access to a real live person to help local advertisers navigate the world of AI-driven advertising can be a difference-maker.

Also, AI-driven technology can help local ad sales teams scale.  Back in my day, we started using rudimentary versions of AI to create a self-service portal to engage more local businesses.  From what I’ve seen, those efforts have grown and improved in recent years.  This makes a lot of sense.  For all of local television advertising’s success, it has never scaled beyond a small percentage of local businesses.  The combination of great local teams and AI can change this dynamic. 

To be clear, the future of the traditional cable players rests in broadband and mobile, not video and local advertising.  The march of technology will continue and there’s no going back to the past.  But history has proven time and again that when faced with massive shifts in technology we tend to discount the importance of people. 

As hard as it is to imagine now, there was a time when cable was the hot-shit new technology.  Securing the home field advantage for local cable ad sales took years of effort and investment, in both technology and personnel.  The people in ad sales, the local teams on the ground, have been difference makers from the beginning.  And, “cable-pocalypse” notwithstanding, they can continue to be in the future if given the chance.