Locality helps brands reach customers through local video advertising across the U.S., spanning both streaming and broadcast channels. The company combines advanced data and automation with in-depth local market expertise to deliver precise targeting and planning so brands can better reach their intended audience. Its product suite, including Audience Engine, was designed to unify fragmented data so advertisers can plan, activate and optimize campaigns in one place. But limited transparency, manual third-party operations, and a fragmented tech stack slowed performance. By integrating Databricks Platform within Audience Engine— with architectural guidance and implementation support from Lovelytics, Locality overcame these challenges and reduced its dependence on costly third-party processors, resulting in an 8–13% reduction in operational costs.
Delivering local media targeting to reach audiences
Operating across 210 U.S. designated market areas (DMAs), Locality delivers video advertising offerings that reach every major media market in the country. With an unwavering mission to unlock the power of local advertising, the company helps brands connect with key audiences by making regional video campaigns both simple and scalable. The key to achieving this vision lies in better business insights and intelligence. With those capabilities in place, Locality planned to build high-value audience segments and profiles for brands to target — exactly what its product, Audience Engine, was designed to do.
Audience Engine is reshaping how advertisers engage their audiences locally or regionally by turning fragmented data into a single, unified asset for campaign planning, marketing activation and outcome measurement. It was purpose-built to address a long-standing industry problem of siloed workflows that forced brand teams to jump between platforms, vendors and manual processes, which slowed decisions, drove up costs and made it difficult to connect strategy to results. By aggregating premium publisher content and centralizing it on a single platform, Audience Engine provides advertisers with access to high-quality, brand-safe inventory, eliminating the need to manage multiple systems. Using cleansed and unified viewership data, Locality connects the full advertising cycle, enabling precise targeting that leads to stronger ROI.
Breaking free from legacy tools and data silos
Historically, complex local data environments have lacked visibility into how campaigns perform across broad media ecosystems, making it difficult for brands and inventory owners to access clear, real-time insights into marketing efforts. This impacted Locality’s ability to fully demonstrate the incremental value clients were receiving from their platform, and assemble a complete and accurate Customer 360 view across advertisers, campaigns and outcomes. Additionally, manual third-party data ingestion and pixel management were resource-intensive leading to time spent troubleshooting, rather than optimizing performance.
At the same time, the local video advertising industry was evolving rapidly. Advertisers began tracking significantly more data points across channels, campaigns and outcomes—creating both complexity and opportunity. For Locality, this shift highlighted the growing importance of delivering a unified Customer 360 view that could connect advertisers, campaigns and performance to unlock deeper insights and more tailored recommendations. However, as data volumes increased, the cost and rigidity of scaling legacy systems made it difficult to fully capitalize on this opportunity.
Recognizing this inflection point, Locality took a fresh look at its technology foundation. Its existing mix of external tools and retrofitted solutions had served earlier needs, but was not purpose-built for the future of local video advertising or the company’s expanding product vision. “Our setup at the time required vendor dependencies and limited how quickly we could innovate,” explained Steve Silvestri, Head of Data Strategy and Innovation at Locality. To move faster and deliver greater value to customers, Locality invested in the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform—gaining the flexibility, scale, and control needed to power a comprehensive Customer 360 view and advance its ambitious roadmap.
Creating a CDP-like solution for the video advertising ecosystem
Choosing to invest in the Databricks Platform on AWS was an important step in evolving Locality’s data foundation and enabling stronger insights for local customers. Through Databricks’ partnership with Lovelytics, a systems integrator specializing in data and AI, Locality gained a clear architectural vision and the implementation support needed to bring their vision to life. The company began by adopting Delta Lake, an open-source storage framework, which ingested billions daily ad impressions, campaign logs and performance data from streaming services and broadcast media partners into Delta Live Tables. This shift replaced manual legacy technology and reduced Locality’s dependency on external processing vendors, giving them greater and faster control over their data assets.
Databricks’ Declarative Pipelines then cleansed and combined these signals to manage complex batch and streaming flows in one place. With built-in reliability, automated testing and SLA guarantees, Declarative Pipelines also gave Locality a single orchestration layer to manage ingestion, transformations and quality checks, freeing engineers to focus on ongoing innovations that deliver deep audience insights to advertisers. Ultimately, they created the reliable, scalable backbone required for Locality’s proprietary Audience Engine and for aggregating local inventory. “Together, Databricks and Lovelytics architected a modular, future-ready data foundation that functions like a composable Customer Data Platform for the paid media ecosystem,” explained Murray Williams, Solutions Architect at Lovelytics.
Layered on top of Delta Lake and Lakeflow Spark Declarative Pipelines, Delta Sharing replaced pixel-based exposure transfers with direct, secure data sharing to major measurement partners. By sending more impressions and identifiers, Locality improved match rates and attribution accuracy for their clients, resulting in higher-fidelity measurement, reduced dependence on legacy mechanisms and lower third-party costs. Governing all tables centrally, Unity Catalog gave Locality fine-grained permissions, lineage tracking and a single point of management for data access. With every column documented and governed, Databricks’ Genie safely enriched metadata and generated readable descriptions, making schemas easier to understand and search. By implementing this structure, Locality transformed governance from an industry barrier to an organizational foundation for scalable AI usage and business intelligence.
Prepared to deploy more machine learning and analytics on Databricks, Locality is tapping into new signals, such as local performance to create richer, more precise segments rather than relying solely on third-party data. To support this process end-to-end, Locality utilized MLflow to manage the full machine learning lifecycle — tracking experiments, versioning models and deploying them reliably — so audience insights could move from prototypes to full product releases. The final layer of value was Databricks Apps, which Locality used to develop lightweight tools responsible for scheduling and distributing reports, datasets and audience outputs without the workflows that had once slowed them down. Complemented by Serverless Compute and Lovelytics’ FinOps accelerator, the team implemented a unified tagging policy and dashboards powered by system tables to monitor compute and storage usage across engineering, ML and BI workloads. Because Locality’s data volumes fluctuated dramatically across days, campaigns and partners, Serverless Compute ensured they could scale seamlessly without overprovisioning infrastructure or incurring surprise costs. By using nearly every major component of the Databricks Platform, Locality created a scalable, governed environment for continued product development and AI experimentation.
Lowering costs while expanding business intelligence
Locality quickly began seeing returns on the foundation built on Databricks. The local video firm achieved an 8–13% reduction in operational costs due to more efficient management of key internal data processes and eliminating intermediaries. And the savings don’t stop there — the team anticipates an additional 20–30% reduction in overall data costs as they continue to build intentional data partnerships.
Beyond cost efficiencies, Locality’s ability to analyze historical campaign data alongside local signals — such as foot traffic, web conversions and market-specific behaviors — and viewership trends provides a powerful foundation for demonstrating performance lift against legacy benchmarks. This intelligence now extends beyond media optimization into broader strategic decision-making. As Steve explained, “We can provide intelligence that helps a marketer determine where to open new stores, not just how to run their campaigns.” In short, the same data that once powered ad targeting now informs business strategy, positioning Locality as a partner capable of shaping future outcomes for their clients.
Laying the foundation for the next era of media innovation
Down the road, Locality intends to turn their growing data advantage into a true competitive moat. With Databricks as the foundation and ongoing architectural guidance from Lovelytics, the company is exploring ways to transform their full data estate into proprietary intellectual property — using a graph-like ontology and machine learning to create products that competitors cannot easily replicate. They will continue laying the groundwork for a composable, media-specific CDP equivalent that can flexibly adapt to new signals, data partners and AI-driven workflows. Finally, Locality is evaluating agentic AI capabilities that could automate downstream activation and clean rooms natively within Databricks, which would allow agencies and brands to collaborate securely on sensitive data without intermediaries. What began as a data modernization effort has evolved into something bigger: a platform for innovation that gives Locality control over their future.