Expert Mode: Audience-First Video Planning Breaks Your Measurement First, with Keith Kazerman from Locality

This article is based on Q&A with Locality President of Streaming Keith Kazerman and Greg Kihlström for The Agile Brand Guide’s Expert Mode series.

Most marketing organizations still run broadcast and streaming as two separate budget lines. Two teams, and often two agencies. Nobody sat down and designed it that way — the arrangement accumulated, because the two businesses grew up on different tracks with different buying habits and different infrastructure behind them.

The viewer never agreed to any of it. Keith Kazerman, President of Streaming at Locality, has been making the case that we’re in an “and” world rather than an “or” world when it comes to local video. We asked him something more pointed than the usual version of that argument: is converging video a planning adjustment, or does a marketing organization have to be built differently for it to work? He gave up the easy answer immediately.

The Split Is a Legacy, Not a Strategy

Kazerman’s position is that planning is where it starts and not where it ends. The structure itself is the inherited thing.

It can start with planning, but ultimately it requires an organizational shift. The two-budget, two-team structure is a legacy of how the landscape evolved: broadcast and streaming grew up on separate tracks with separate buying habits and infrastructures, and most organizations were built around that history. Consumers, though, don’t experience it that way. They move fluidly between broadcast, streaming, and digital, often without registering it as switching channels at all.

For a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), the practical read is less dramatic than “reorganize.” Full structural change is slow and politically expensive, and most brands won’t get it approved in a quarter. What’s available sooner is shared planning inputs — one audience definition, one frequency view, one set of market priorities that both teams work from before either one buys anything. A regional restaurant chain pushing a limited-time offer in Tampa doesn’t need a merged org to stop double-paying for the same household across a local news buy and an ad-supported streaming placement. It needs the two plans to be built off the same audience picture. Kazerman frames the upside in terms of what each side contributes: broadcast delivers “reach, trust, and local relevance,” while streaming adds “precision, flexibility, and targeting.” Coordinating around how people actually watch in a given market is what lets those compound instead of overlap.

What Breaks First Is the Reporting

Asked to get specific for someone who owns the budget, Kazerman started with sequence rather than technology. “Start by asking who you’re trying to reach, where they are consuming video and what action you want them to take,” he said, “and then determine the role each channel should play based on what it can contribute to the overall campaign.” Automatic content recognition, cross-platform deduplication, and consistent reporting come after that question, not before it.

Then he named the failure point, which is the more useful part of the answer:

The challenge is that audience-first planning quickly exposes gaps in measurement because platforms use different datasets, identity systems, and methodologies. The goal is to move beyond separate channel reports and understand who was reached, how the platforms worked together, and whether the campaign drove the intended outcome.

That’s worth sitting with, because it inverts the usual sales narrative. Audience-first planning doesn’t fix measurement. It reveals how bad measurement already was, and it does so in front of the CFO. A marketing leader who shifts planning from channels to audiences should expect the first quarter of reporting to look worse, not better — duplicated reach that used to hide inside two separate decks now shows up as a single embarrassing number. The work that follows is identity resolution and a deliberate choice about what multi-channel measurement standard the organization will treat as true. Pick that standard before the campaign, or the post-campaign argument becomes a debate about whose numbers to believe.

The Questions to Ask Before Believing Anyone’s Data Advantage

Here’s where we pushed. Converged measurement has been promised for most of a decade, and Locality sells a platform that plans and measures both sides together — so “stop planning them separately” is also Kazerman’s commercial position. We asked him to argue the other side, and to say how a marketer distinguishes a real data advantage from a good deck about proprietary data.

He gave ground on the first half only partially. Broadcast and streaming have different strengths, inventory structures and measurement methodologies, he said, but those differences “should inform how each channel contributes to a unified strategy rather than lead marketers back to separate planning processes.” Convergence “shouldn’t mean treating every impression or platform as interchangeable.” That’s a narrower concession than the question asked for, and CMOs should read it as such. On the second half he was more concrete:

When a partner says their data gives them an advantage, marketers should ask questions: Where does the data come from? How much of the campaign does it capture? How is it connected across platforms? And can the results be verified by an independent measurement source?

Those four questions are a usable procurement filter, and the fourth one does most of the work. Independent verification is the claim that’s expensive to fake. A partner who can point to a third-party measurement source willing to stand behind the reach and outcome numbers is in a different category from one whose advantage lives entirely inside its own dashboard. Kazerman’s own framing is the standard to hold him to: proprietary data “only creates an advantage if it gives the advertiser a clearer view of the audience and leads to better decisions about where and how to invest.” Ask a prospective partner which decision their data changed for a comparable advertiser last year.

Own the Customer, Rent the Media Intelligence

The consensus line across every category right now is that AI alone won’t create competitive advantage — that data will. It’s true and nearly useless as stated, so we asked Kazerman to draw the line on the brand side: what should a CMO own outright, and what should they rent from partners like his?

Brands should own the data and intelligence that define their customer; their first-party relationships, transactions, CRM data, loyalty behavior, and understanding of what makes someone a valuable customer. That matters because this customer knowledge is unique to the brand and becomes a long-term competitive advantage that shouldn’t depend on any one platform or partner.

What brands should go to partners for, in his telling, is media intelligence — where those audiences are watching, how behavior differs market to market, and how to reach more of the right people. The division is clean enough to act on. First-party data about who your customers are and what they’re worth stays in your house, portable across vendors. Knowledge about where video inventory sits in Sacramento versus Charlotte is a rental, and it should be priced and contracted like one. “AI itself won’t be the differentiator because everyone will have access to similar technology,” Kazerman said. The differentiator is what you feed it. A CMO who can’t currently export their audience definitions and campaign history out of a partner’s platform doesn’t own that intelligence, whatever the contract says.

Local relevance at national scale is where this gets governance-heavy fast, and Kazerman’s first move is a restraint rather than an expansion: identify where localization actually makes a difference “rather than creating hundreds of variations simply because the technology allows it.” Use customer and market insight to decide where the message should change, then set explicit guardrails on which creative elements can be personalized at all. Second move, same quarter: build the measurement framework before the campaign launches, covering reach, frequency, duplication, and outcomes across platforms.

And before committing any spend, he’d put one question to an agency or measurement partner — how they would prove he’s reaching the right audience rather than delivering more impressions. It’s a good question because it’s hard to answer with a deck. Ask it early enough and the answer tells you whether you’re buying an audience strategy or a delivery report, which is the same two-budget problem showing up in a different costume.