This month Google began moving search campaigns onto its AI whether advertisers asked or not. Automation is excellent at capturing demand. It was never built to create it, and that gap is where local plans win or lose the holiday season.

AI assistants are now the third most common way people find a local business, and they name two or three before stopping. There are exactly two ways to be one of them, and advertising drives both.

Somewhere in almost every media conversation, someone says a version of the same sentence. "We love the news, but we need to reach younger people, so we're putting that budget into social."

Pittsburgh's football audience gathers Friday, Saturday, and Monday, turns up in every newscast between, and keeps reading about it on their phones all week. Every one of those moments is buyable.

Every election year, local businesses go dark to wait out the political noise. It's usually the wrong move.

There is a persistent myth in local retail marketing: that the holiday season begins the day after Thanksgiving. The data says otherwise.