Borrell Associates

Local media companies first — broadcast groups, newspaper companies, cable interconnects, directory and digital shops — plus the investment analysts who cover them and the agencies that buy against them. Borrell works with more than a thousand media properties, and most major local media companies are clients.

Inside those companies the primary reader is a sales manager or a market manager building a go-to-market plan, and increasingly the individual seller who wants a category number to put in front of a prospect. It is a seller's tool with an analyst's pedigree, not the other way around.

Borrell's stated expertise is knowing what businesses spend on advertising and marketing in any U.S. market. Two products carry most of that weight. Compass, seen at adspending.com, tracks and forecasts ad spending by market, by business category, and by media type. Local Scope profiles the customers of a specific local business using the movement of mobile phones, which lets it demographically describe a competitor's customers and show where two businesses' customer bases overlap.

The underlying intention is a shift in the sales conversation. Instead of a generic pitch about digital, a rep can open with what this category actually spends in this county and where those dollars currently go. Borrell frames the goal as helping companies grow revenue exponentially rather than incrementally.

Four streams feed the model. First, direct survey of advertisers: Borrell surveys close to 10,000 small and medium businesses a year, including a semi-annual Local Advertiser and Agency Survey with more than 35 questions covering what a business spent last year, what it plans to spend, what it is cutting and increasing, and how it rates the performance of radio, print, digital, OTT, social and the rest.

Second, media company reporting — revenue data supplied by the local media firms that subscribe. Third, public and financial disclosure from the large national platforms and public media companies. Fourth, for Local Scope, licensed mobile location data. Borrell then layers economic and business-count data to distribute national and regional totals down to market and county level.

Survey material is the freshest thing in the file and also the most perishable. The quarterly Business Barometer is a short-horizon read on advertiser sentiment: the mid-2026 edition surveyed 149 SMBs between June 9 and June 26 and found 62 percent expecting to spend about the same over the next six months and another 15 percent planning increases, for 77 percent holding or growing. That number is useful for perhaps two quarters.

The market-level spend estimates age more slowly but rest on a base year that is one to two years behind. A 2026 county estimate is typically anchored on 2024 or 2025 actuals with a growth factor applied. Treat the shape of the pie as reliable and the exact dollar figure as an estimate with a real margin around it, especially in small markets where the sample thins.

Borrell is the only widely used source that reports what the buyer says, at a geography small enough to matter to a local seller. Everything else in this section reports what sellers booked, what ads ran, or what a national total looks like. Knowing that a category in your county spends a certain share on events and sponsorships, or that direct mail is holding better than expected, changes the recommendation you write.

Borrell's survey work has also been useful for puncturing assumptions. Their research has repeatedly found local buyers less sophisticated than the trade press assumes, and traditional media holding a stronger position in the local mix than national digital narratives suggest — with radio, social, events and sponsorships, and newspapers all sitting near the top of local business choices.

• Business Barometer — quarterly advertiser sentiment.
• Local Advertiser and Agency Survey — twice a year, spring and fall. Spring field runs roughly April 1 to May 30.
• Annual Benchmarking Report — the flagship, on local digital ad spending and the share captured by locally based media companies. The 21st edition covered $95.4 billion in local digital spend, of which $13.3 billion reached local media companies.
• Compass forecasts — refreshed on a rolling basis inside the platform.
• Ongoing — Chart of the Week, Corey's Local Marketing Minute, the Local Marketing Trends podcast, topical industry papers, and a free Research Alert email list.

Survey responses are weighted and projected against business counts by category and geography. Each participating market in the advertiser survey gets back an Excel workbook with every question answered, benchmarked against a national and company average, plus a highlights presentation and a contact file of participants including their open-ended answers — which is, in practice, a qualified prospect list with stated budgets attached.

The Compass model then reconciles that bottom-up survey view against top-down media revenue figures, so that the sum of category spending in a market is consistent with what the market's media actually collects. Local Scope runs on a different track entirely, aggregating anonymized phone movement into demographic profiles of a named business's visitors.