BIA Advisory Services

Media owners, broadcast and cable groups, ad tech firms selling into local, private equity and lenders underwriting station deals, and the trade press that quotes the headline number every quarter. The forecast is the public face; the valuation and ownership work is the quieter half of the business and serves buyers, sellers and appraisers of broadcast properties.

For a seller, BIA is background rather than a call tool. It answers what the whole local pie looks like and which way each slice is moving.

BIA produces the U.S. Local Advertising Forecast and delivers the underlying data through its ADVantage platform, where the numbers arrive with analysis and visualizations rather than as a bare table. The forecast is built to be sliced — by DMA, by media type including broadcast TV, cable, radio, direct mail, out-of-home, mobile, social, search, and CTV/OTT, and by advertiser vertical.

The current cycle projects total 2026 U.S. local ad revenue at $184.5 billion, an increase of roughly 8.1 percent over 2025 and a revision upward from an earlier $181.7 billion estimate, driven by stronger-than-expected mobile and social, video and streaming, political spending, and ad technology. Excluding political, the 2026 figure is $176.1 billion. Political alone is put at about $8.4 billion, spread across broadcast television, linear cable, CTV/OTT, radio and direct mail. BIA's longer view has total local advertising exceeding $222 billion by 2030, and the current forecast has added digital out-of-home estimates to the media mix.

Top-down, not survey-first. BIA starts from national media revenue totals — public company filings, industry association reporting, platform disclosures, government economic series — and allocates them across markets using population, household income, business counts, retail sales and its own station-level revenue estimates. Its long-standing station and ownership database, built around FCC records, underpins the market-level allocation and the valuation practice.

Political estimates draw on election calendars, race competitiveness, and historical spend patterns by office and market, which is why BIA's political number moves as the cycle clarifies.

The initial forecast for a year is released in the fourth quarter of the year before, then revised during the year as actuals arrive. The 2026 forecast was released in Q4 2025 and revised in April 2026. That revision pattern is the honest signal about shelf life: a forecast issued fourteen months out is a planning frame, and the in-year revision is the one you should quote.

Political estimates are the most volatile component and the most likely to be restated. Category and vertical breakdowns hold up longer than absolute dollars.

BIA is the number the industry argues about, which makes it the number your prospect's corporate office may already have seen. Its commentary also frames the market in ways that are directly usable in a proposal. The current cycle describes a K-shaped consumer economy, with stronger spending from higher-income households supporting travel, leisure and automotive, and value-oriented spending shaping demand in retail, restaurants and essential services. Growth verticals named include real estate, restaurants, travel, retail and financial services.

BIA is also willing to say plainly that traditional media still carries the local proposition — that broadcast TV, cable and radio provide the scale, credibility and local connection advertisers rely on — which is a useful third-party sentence in a room where you are the interested party.

• Annual forecast — released in Q4 for the following year.
• Revisions — typically at least once mid-year; the 2026 revision came in April.
• ADVantage data — updated on the platform's own cycle with the forecast releases.
• Political cycle work — heavier output in even-numbered years as races settle.
• Station and ownership data — maintained continuously against FCC filings.

National totals by medium are estimated first, then disaggregated to 210 DMAs using weighted local economic indicators, then reconciled against BIA's bottom-up station revenue estimates so that market sums stay plausible. Digital categories that have no local reporting requirement — social, search, CTV — are apportioned using platform disclosures and modeled local shares, which is where the largest uncertainty sits.

Forecast growth rates are applied by medium and vertical rather than uniformly, which is why print continues to decline in the model while other legacy formats are described as evolving instead.