Something is working in radio that isn’t working anywhere else in legacy media. Revenue is growing, and the answer, according to new analysis from Borrell Associates, comes down to a bet most stations are only beginning to make. Yet the good news comes with a warning.
Borrell Associates President Jim Brown, CEO Gordon Borrell, and EVP of Local Market Intelligence Corey Elliott hosted a webinar discussing the shifting dynamics of local advertising and what they mean for radio and media sales forces navigating an accelerating structural shift in who buys ads and why.
The US added roughly 1.7 million new business establishments between 2020 and 2025, a 16% increase from approximately 10 million to over 12 million, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data Elliott presented. But that headline figure obscures a radical divergence at the local level. Some markets grew at three times the national rate. Others shrank.
The structural shift away from retail as a radio advertising category drew extended discussion. Borrell argued that legacy broadcasters are still organizing their sales efforts around a category in structural decline. Pandemic-era behavioral changes accelerated online purchasing of clothing, furniture, jewelry, and shoes in ways that didn’t reverse. What’s left in local markets, and what’s growing, is services. “If you’re in an old media mindset where all you see are personal injury attorneys, HVAC companies, and automobile dealerships advertising on billboards and on television,” Borrell noted, “that’s really old prospecting methods.”
For radio specifically, there is good news, as opposed to its other legacy media brethren, but that news came with a pointed diagnosis. “The radio industry is now the only industry that’s actually seeing net growth by adding the additional revenue in digital to the slowly declining revenue in radio,” Borrell said, pointing to streaming audio, targeted display, and digital out-of-home as the formats carrying stations toward positive total revenue.
Overall, the Borrell four-year forecast projects stable local advertising growth through 2029 with a modest cyclical dip tied to an eight-to-twelve-year economic pattern dating to the dot-com bust, the 2008 recession, and the 2020 pandemic. Within that trajectory, digital continues pulling share from linear. Direct mail is projected to grow 8% from 2025 to 2029 as targeting technology ties it more tightly to online behavior. Out-of-home, increasingly digital, is also projected up 8%.
General paid search growth is expected to flatten as AI-powered listing results absorb the category’s next growth phase.
The more urgent threat the panel identified isn’t format competition. It’s the sophistication of the buyers that radio reps are calling on. Borrell’s Business Barometer, a quarterly SMB survey, found that a decade ago, 74% of local business marketing decision-makers qualified as novices, defined as having fewer than 3,333 lifetime hours of marketing experience. That figure has dropped to 56%, with more crossing the 10,000-hour master marketer threshold through on-the-job experience and AI-assisted decision-making. Borrell estimates 60% of SMBs now use AI for marketing tasks, potentially including media buying recommendations.
The ratio of internal business marketers to external ad sales reps has flipped from rough parity in 2010 to three-to-one today. “If local ad sales reps can’t keep pace, they’ll be viewed merely as sellers,” Borrell noted.
As such, the session closed with a warning about prospecting methods: stations still building prospect lists around the categories most visible on billboards and evening newscasts are chasing yesterday’s advertisers. The competitive advantage now belongs to the radio seller who walks in knowing more about a client’s market than the client’s own AI does.
