The US digital advertising market continues to expand, but growth is also making the business harder to manage. Digital ad revenue reached nearly $300 billion in 2025, up 13.9% year over year, according to the IAB and PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report. At the same time, publishers and advertisers are dealing with more formats, fragmented audiences, new AI driven channels, and increasing pressure to demonstrate results.
That is putting more attention on the systems operating behind advertising.
Advance Local, one of the largest media and marketing groups in the US, has selected advertising technology company ADvendio as its long term partner for advertising order management and infrastructure.
The decision will bring sales, campaign management, fulfilment, billing, and revenue operations together on a single platform. For Advance Local, the objective is to reduce the amount of manual work involved in running its advertising business while giving commercial teams more time to work directly with clients.
Advance Local operates news brands including NJ.com, AL.com, MLive, OregonLive, and Cleveland.com. Its portfolio reaches more than 50 million people each month, according to the company.
Its business extends beyond publishing. Advance Travel and Tourism works with destinations and travel brands, Advance Healthcare serves specialty practices, hospitals, and senior living organizations, and Advance Education works with vocational schools, community colleges, and universities. Advance Local Solutions works with businesses across the regional economies where the group operates.
That variety means the company has to manage advertising products and workflows across very different categories.
The infrastructure behind the campaign
ADvendio will provide Advance Local with a unified system connecting pricing, inventory execution, and billing. The company expects that to reduce manual interventions and the need for complex customizations across its existing operations.
The timing comes as automation becomes a larger part of advertising. The IAB’s 2026 outlook projects US ad spending to grow 12.3% this year, while two thirds of advertisers are focused on agentic AI for ad buying and campaign execution.
For publishers, however, automation also creates new demands around control and visibility. A separate IAB report found that 96% of buyers see a role for agentic AI in programmatic advertising, but there is still no consensus about what that role should be. Four in ten buyers want humans to remain involved, while others are calling for audit trails and guardrails around what AI systems can do.
Advance Local is therefore looking beyond immediate efficiency. ADvendio’s architecture is intended to give the company room to introduce new workflows, increase automation, and eventually incorporate AI driven capabilities as its advertising operation develops.
“At Advance Solutions, everything starts with helping our clients succeed. We wanted an operations platform that supports that mission. By unifying planning, fulfilment and reporting, ADvendio streamlines the work behind the scenes and gives our teams more time to focus on what matters most: understanding our clients’ challenges and helping them achieve better business outcomes,” said Natalie Pruitt, president of Advance Solutions, a division of Advance Local.
For ADvendio, the agreement represents a move deeper into the infrastructure of a large media organization. For Advance Local, it is a bet that the technology underneath its advertising operation can become more flexible as the market changes.
As digital advertising moves toward more automation, the systems managing campaigns may become as important as the channels where those campaigns appear.
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
