Local Media's Fastest Path To Margin Starts With Solving The 'Decision Drag' Problem

Over the last decade, local media companies have added revenue lines faster than they've added anything in their history, from programmatic and OTT to social, display, events, and marketing services. They became full-service agencies. The infrastructure underneath the selling operation never made the same shift, and the cost of that mismatch shows up everywhere: in margin, in speed, and in talent walking out the door.

Jennifer Scilabro is Chief Growth Officer at Ribeye, an AI-powered revenue and operations platform built for local media. She spent the bulk of her career on the operator side, serving as SVP of Local Digital Sales at Nexstar and later building the company's first enterprise-wide sales enablement function for more than 2,000 sellers across four business units. Before that she led digital sales through the Tribune Broadcasting acquisition and held leadership roles at Advance Local and Local TV LLC. She watched the same gap between seller talent and system capability hold back teams at every stop, which is what eventually pulled her to the platform side.

"I see what they can do when they finally have the tools that match their talent," she says, "and what gets left on the table when they don't."

Where Revenue Momentum Goes to Die

Every media company Scilabro talks to is looking at expense reduction and margin growth. Almost none have taken a serious look at the systems sitting underneath their selling strategy. "That's the biggest area of opportunity," she says. The legacy systems became the constraint. Sellers can't answer basic questions quickly: what's available to sell, what is performing, where is margin being lost, what should they pitch next. "When the sales leaders or the operations leaders can't identify confidently where their revenue is, the whole operation stalls."

She calls the result "decision drag." Teams spend more time managing workflows than creating revenue, buried in manual proposal building and reports that get pulled from one system, reconciled in another, and delivered in a third. At every handoff between sales, operations, and account management, the momentum slows. "It's not about chasing another shiny ad tech platform," Scilabro says. "It's about giving them durable infrastructure that helps them move faster."

Mapping the Band-Aids

Scilabro's fix starts with a diagnostic. Follow the full revenue cycle from prospecting through reporting and renewals; trace every handoff; identify the swivel points where a person leaves one platform and opens another to complete a task or find information.

"Business leaders in media companies think they know this process. But when they actually go and speak to the people in these individual roles, they learn about all these band-aids that have been put in place that were never really addressed," she explains. The typical organizational response has been to add another person to cover the gap rather than fix the system creating it.

The exercise serves to answer three questions: Where does the work slow down? Where does visibility disappear? And where are people doing manual work that systems should handle?

The Right Partner for the Job

Most executive teams remain frozen by the fear that modernization will require ripping everything out all at once. Scilabro argues the entry point should be a business outcome: where does the organization need clearer visibility, faster execution, or recovered margin?

She flags a few filters that separate useful partners from expensive distractions. Whether the partner genuinely understands local selling, because national-scale infrastructure narrowed down to local almost never works. How AI is actually being used. "Everyone says they have AI now," she says. "But is it a feature layer, a nice sprinkle on top, or is it actually tied to workflow automation built around intelligence and shared data?"

And then there's pricing. In some previous vendor relationships, Scilabro found that less than half of the media spend was reaching working media dollars after intermediary fees. "It was a light bulb for me," she recalls. Any partner worth evaluating, she says, should be able to show you exactly where the dollars land.

Where Does the Time Go?

The human cost is showing up as burnout, and Scilabro says the last five years have been the worst she's seen in her career. Sellers have been pressed into roles as account managers, report pullers, proposal builders, and operations coordinators. The work that made them valuable—identifying opportunities and building client relationships—gets crowded out by the work their systems force on them. "You're basically forcing them to do things that they're just not naturally good at," she says.

The pattern holds well beyond media. Across industries, 72% of sales organizations fail to reinvest AI-driven time savings into high-value selling activities, even when the tools are saving sellers nearly five hours a week. The technology may free up time, but whether that time goes back to revenue or gets absorbed by the next manual task in the queue is an infrastructure question.

Scilabro predicts that the margin improvements media companies need will come from process efficiency, not headcount. "Seller enablement is the new vogue term for growth in 2026, 2027. If you can empower the sellers to do what they do well, you're going to win." She sees the lines between order management systems, DSPs, and SSPs dissolving into something closer to a single operating system for local media. The siloed model, where broadcast revenue and digital revenue and events revenue each sit in separate buckets with separate workflows, is reaching the end of its useful life.

Core local TV ad revenue is sliding toward $13.5 billion in 2026 once political spending is stripped out. Amazon is opening its streaming inventory to local advertisers for the first time. The market is not waiting for local media to catch up. But the assets that make local media valuable—the relationships, the audiences, the market knowledge—haven't gone anywhere. "The future of local advertising shouldn't belong to the intermediaries," Scilabro says. "It should belong to the people who are closest to the value creation, which is at the local marketplace."