Here’s something that might surprise you: the biggest brands in the country aren’t just getting better digital advertising than your local business — they’re paying less for it.
That doesn’t seem fair, does it? But that’s exactly how the system works, and it’s time local businesses understood why.
How National Businesses Built Their Branding Empires Online
Every time you visit a website, open an app, or stream a show, there’s an auction happening behind the scenes. In milliseconds, advertisers bid for the opportunity to show you an ad. This is called programmatic advertising, and it’s how the overwhelming majority of digital ads are bought and sold today.
National brands — think Macy’s, Hotels.com, Home Depot — have been using this system for years. They spend big, so they get bulk rates, priority placements, and the best inventory.
The technology platforms, the minimum spends, the contracts — all of it was designed for companies spending tens of thousands of dollars a month. A local business with $500 or even $1,500 to spend? The system wasn’t built for you. So, even though small businesses ARE using the same system, they have to pay premium prices for the same placements — if they can even afford to get in the door.
And that’s how big businesses have built massive brand awareness in every market across the country.
What This Has Looked Like In Our Market
If you’ve ever been pitched digital advertising by a local rep, you’ve probably been offered things like geofencing, display ads, streaming TV placements, or online video. And the price tag probably started somewhere around $1,500 a month with a three-month commitment — minimum.
What you might not have been told is that a significant portion of that budget isn’t actually buying ads. It’s paying for the layers of technology, middlemen, and corporate overhead sitting between your business and the platforms where your ads actually run. Every hand the money passes through takes a cut before a single ad gets placed.
Why This Is Actually A Branding Problem
There’s a misconception that programmatic advertising is just about getting clicks. For big brands, that’s never been the primary goal. They use this technology for branding — getting their name, their logo, their message in front of people over and over again, across every screen, until it’s impossible to forget them.
Think about it. You don’t click on most ads you see. But you remember them. You remember seeing that Home Depot ad while you were checking the weather. You remember that State Farm ad during the show you were streaming last night. That repetition across multiple platforms is what builds brand recognition, and it’s exactly what programmatic advertising was designed to do at scale.
Local businesses have never had the ability to do this — not because the strategy wouldn’t work for them, but because the technology to execute it has been priced out of reach. A local restaurant, auto shop, or law firm would benefit enormously from that same kind of multi-platform brand presence in their own community. They’ve just never been able to afford the entry ticket.
What Changes When You Own The Technology
Instead of renting access to someone else’s technology — and paying their markup — I built the platform from the ground up so that local businesses can plug into the same system that national brands use. Directly. No middlemen. No layers of corporate overhead between your budget and your ads.
That means a local business spending $500 a month can now access the same premium inventory — streaming TV, connected TV, online video, display, mobile, audio — that a national brand buying millions of impressions gets and have the buying power to outbid them. The playing field isn’t perfectly level, because volume will always matter. But for the first time, local businesses can actually show up on the same screens, the same websites, and the same platforms more frequently where only national brands used to appear.
Your ads on the same sites. In the same market. Reaching your actual customers.
That’s not a small thing. That’s the thing that changes everything for local advertising.
Constance Craver is the Founder and CEO of MediaCraver, the first programmatic advertising platform built specifically for local businesses. Based in Redding, CA, MediaCraver connects Northstate businesses to premium digital advertising starting at $500/month.
Learn more at MediaCraver.com or email: cc@mediaplusredding.com