We’ve built our teams into highly specialized, channel-specific experts. We have a CTV team focused on reach, a DOOH team focused on high impact locations, and a performance team (Display, Social) focused on conversion.
The problem? We plan in silos, but our business is built on two truths that tear those silos apart.
Truth #1: Your customer is channel-less. They don’t care about (y)our internal org charts. Their journey is fluid. They don’t think “online” or “offline”; they just shop. In fact, the vast majority of consumers now expect a seamless experience, researching online before buying in-store (and vice-versa). And we make them see a CTV ad at home, get a social post on the bus, and walk past a DOOH screen at lunch…
Truth #2: Your market context is everything. While the customer journey is fluid, the context of that journey is fiercely local. The “job-to-be-done” for your brand in Chicago, where you’re a market leader, is completely different from your job in Miami, where you’re a challenger needing to conquest.
For years, the industry’s answer to this fragmentation was “The Old Playbook”: chase a “unified audience.” Buy the same “Auto Intender” or “QSR Loyalist” segment across every platform and every city.
Let’s be sharp: This one-size-fits-all model is dead.
It’s not just inefficient; it’s a colossal waste of capital. It means spending your premium CTV budget on markets that already have 90% brand awareness. It means running expensive “retargeting” ads in cities where you have the most loyal clients, completely missing the competitor rising two towns over.
The math on this is brutal:
- Forrester Research estimates 37% of ad spend is wasted, often because campaigns lack the granular insights that reflect real shopping patterns.
- An Amplified report found brands waste $250B annually on ineffective advertising due to “dull media” and low attention, a direct symptom of generic, non-contextual planning.
- We see this firsthand: A recent Locala analysis for a retail partner found that 22% of their media impressions were allocated to areas and strategies where growth was nearly impossible using their past national plan. We started optimizing that for them.
That 30% of your budget you’re wasting by ignoring granular business context is precisely the +30% performance you’re leaving on the table.
- Planning by audience alone is like shouting the same message into every room.
- Planning by context is starting the right conversation in the right room.
This is the central thesis at Locala: audience is a response to brand context.
Long story short: If your 2026 plan still starts with ‘target audience’ instead of ‘target context’, it’s already outdated.
Keep reading: I’ll break down how this “context-first” approach changes the game for every channel in your mix, and end with a concrete playbook of questions to accelerate your 2026 planning.
The Channel-Less Customer Demands Unified Planning
The challenge we all face is that our insights are often as siloed as our teams. We have web analytics in one dashboard, store visit reports in another, and competitive data in a static PowerPoint.
This fragmentation makes it impossible to plan for a “channel-less” customer.
To win in this new landscape, media planning must find its roots in omnichannel insights. It must be:
- Unified: You must have a single view that fuses online intent signals (like web traffic share and on-site engagement ) with offline “ground truth” (like store traffic share and visitor loyalty ).
- Benchmark-Based: Seeing your own performance is useless without context. You must be able to benchmark your brand’s online and offline health against your true local competitors.
- Granular: National averages hide local opportunities. The plan must be built from the store, ZIP-code , and city level up, not the national level down.
- Actionable: This is the most critical step. The insights must translate directly into an omnichannel activation plan. The friction between the strategy deck and the activation platform is where most campaigns fail.
Your 2026 Planning Kick-Off
This level of unified, actionable planning is the goal, but it has been operationally impossible for most teams, until now.
To help kick-start this process for 2026, here are the 10 questions every retail and brand leader should be asking their teams and partners right now:
- Do we know our true competitive performance, both online and in-store, in our top 20 markets?
- Where are our “opportunity zones”, markets where our online awareness is low but our offline conversion is high?
- Where are our “at-risk” zones, markets where online engagement is high, but we are losing store traffic share?
- Who are our local competitors in each market, not just our national ones?
- What is our customer switcher rate in City A vs. City B? And who are they switching to?
- How are we using our CTV budget? Is it a blunt national buy, or focused on specific areas to solve awareness problems?
- How do we select DOOH panels? Is it based on location type, or on the purchase affinity of the people who pass-by?
- Are our social and display ads telling the same story everywhere, or are they localized to match the specific business challenge of that market (e.g., conquesting vs. loyalty)?
- Can our planning platform move directly from insight to activation, or are we manually rebuilding audiences and geos in different systems?
- Is our measurement a simple media report, or a true learning loop that feeds back into our next planning cycle?
Answering these questions moves you from complexity to clarity.
It’s how we build resonance and drive real growth, one market at a time.
From Context-First Planning to Channel-Smarter Activation
This “Business Context Planning” approach is the essential foundation for everything that comes next. We created Omni Planner specifically to answer these questions and eliminate the friction between strategy and execution.
But a great plan is useless if it dies on a slide. Planning is the first step; insights actionability is the critical second. Location-Based Advertising (LBA) isn’t just a planning theory; it’s an activation concept that makes every channel in your mix smarter.
Here’s how.
CTV
- When: You see low awareness + strong store potential in specific areas.
- Do: Concentrate CTV into those areas (city/ZIP/postcode) using online intent + mobility to pick clusters.
- Expect: Fewer wasted impressions; measurable local awareness/visits lift at flat spend.
DOOH
- When: You need physical reach among “brand switchers” or “in-market researchers.”
- Do: Score panels by passer affinity + time-of-day; buy to behaviors, not venue types.
- Expect: Higher panel efficiency and conquest impact vs. “all malls/stations” rules.
OLV
- When: Awareness is decent, but digital engagement lags.
- Do: Deploy consideration creative in those markets; optimize to qualified site behaviors.
- Expect: Local engagement lift; OLV becomes a surgical mid-funnel lever.
Display & Social
- When: You need scale with granular nuances.
- Do: Run parallel plays: conquest in competitor strongholds, loyalty in defender zones, launch in expansion areas.
- Expect: “Scale without sameness”: more business relevance, better blended CPA/CPiv.
The one-size-fits-all national plan is over.
Stop chasing who. Start solving where and why.
That is how we move from managing complexity to driving real growth, one market at a time.
Here is what I recommend for your next 90 days:
- Build your Local Context Baseline (intent, engagement, store traffic, loyalty vs. local rivals), or book a demo with us.
- Ring-fence 20-40% of budgets to fund opportunity zones.
- Run the 3-Play Pack: CTV (seed awareness), DOOH (buy behaviours), Social/Display (localised stories).
- Report at the area level and feed the loop, then repeat.
