Guideline yesterday announced the launch of a digital extension to its SQADCosts Local product, adding CPM benchmarks for locally geo-targeted buys across Connected TV, audio streaming, and podcasting. The company says the new offering covers the top 60+ publishers in the U.S. market and is available immediately as an add-on to existing SQADCosts Local subscriptions.

The announcement, made April 30, 2026, represents the first time Guideline has applied its long-standing Average / Low / High pricing framework to digital video and audio, rather than limiting it to local linear television. For buyers and sellers who have relied on SQADCosts Local as a reference for linear rates, the move extends a familiar structure into channels where comparable benchmarking has been largely absent.

What SQADCosts Local Digital Extension actually does

The core mechanics of the new product mirror those of the linear version. For each publisher in the coverage set, the Digital Extension reports three price points - Average, Low, and High - on a monthly basis. Every data point is normalized to a consistent baseline before being published, a deliberate design choice meant to address one of the persistent frustrations in digital benchmarking: that CPMs across publishers are rarely comparable without adjustment.

The normalization criteria, according to the announcement, are specific. Coverage is limited to locally geo-targeted placements only. Broad-audience targeting applies, defined as P2+ and A18+. The dataset breaks out ad length and distinguishes between Entertainment and Sports content. These parameters are applied uniformly across the entire publisher set, so a $40 CPM for a CTV streamer and a $15 CPM for a podcast network are expressed against the same baseline. Without that kind of standardization, headline CPMs from different publishers reflect different buying conditions, making side-by-side comparison unreliable.

The publisher scope spans major CTV streamers, ad-supported video platforms, audio streaming services, and podcast networks - covering what the company describes as the top 60+ video and audio publishers in the U.S. market. Publishers below that threshold are not included in the initial release.

The problem it is solving

The gap the Digital Extension is targeting is straightforward to describe but has resisted easy solutions. National CPM benchmarks for digital video and audio are relatively available. Local benchmarks are not. Buyers running geo-targeted campaigns - campaigns aimed at audiences in specific markets, DMAs, or regions rather than broad national audiences - have historically had to negotiate without a reliable reference point for what prices should look like.

That asymmetry matters because local-first advertising is not a small slice of the market. Regional advertisers, local TV station groups, and agencies serving geographically concentrated clients run plans that are primarily geo-targeted from the start. National digital benchmarks offer limited guidance in those situations. The price an advertiser pays for nationally-targeted CTV inventory does not necessarily reflect what they will pay when the buy is narrowed to a single DMA or metro area. Supply thins, competition shifts, and CPMs move.

On the sell side, the problem is inverted. Publishers competing for local and regional advertising dollars need to understand how their pricing compares to direct competitors in the same formats and geographies. Without a shared reference, both sides of the transaction are negotiating with incomplete information.

The SQADCosts Local product has addressed this problem for linear television for what Guideline describes as "decades." The Digital Extension applies the same logic to channels that have grown rapidly without the pricing transparency infrastructure that linear television built over many years.

The CTV and audio context

The timing of the launch reflects where the market stands heading into 2026. Connected television has become the primary growth engine in programmatic advertising. As PPC Land has reported, CTV budgets increased three percentage points year-over-year to 26% of media spend on average, and more than half of respondents in a January 2026 survey expected more than 60% of their CTV budgets to be transacted programmatically during the year. Audio budgets also grew, rising one percentage point to 10% of media spend. Linear television, by contrast, held flat at 20%.

That shift creates demand for pricing infrastructure calibrated to how digital buys actually work. CTV CPMs in the programmatic market averaged $4.82 in January 2026, according to DataBeat data reported by PPC Land, well above all other device categories despite a seasonal decline. Year-over-year, CTV CPMs grew 29.2%. Those figures are for programmatic national inventory. Local geo-targeted inventory sits in a different segment of the market, with different supply dynamics.

On the audio side, programmatic infrastructure has expanded considerably. Amazon DSP and SiriusXM integrated programmatic access to 160 million monthly digital listeners through a partnership announced September 2025. Viant gained programmatic access to iHeartMedia's complete audio network, including over-the-air broadcast radio inventory, in December 2025. Podcast advertising spending surged 26% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2025, with nearly 1,700 brands testing the channel for the first time.

Each of those developments increased the volume of programmatic transactions in digital audio. None of them produced a shared benchmark for geo-targeted CPMs across those publishers. That is the void Guideline is addressing.

What the CEO said

Vincent Mifsud, CEO of Guideline, framed the launch in terms of extending an existing standard rather than creating a new one. "Guideline SQADCosts Local has long been the standard for local pricing transparency in linear, and our customers have asked us to bring that same level of clarity to digital media," Mifsud said in the announcement. "The Digital Extension gives local-first buyers and sellers a like-for-like view of geo-targeted CPMs across CTV, digital video, audio streaming, and podcasting, reported in the same Average, Low, and High framework they already rely on every day."

The phrase "like-for-like" carries weight in this context. Direct comparability across publishers has historically been one of the hardest problems in digital benchmarking, given differences in audience targeting, ad length, content type, and inventory packaging. The normalization methodology is Guideline's mechanism for making that comparability achievable.

Who Guideline is and what it tracks

Guideline describes itself as a global provider of ad intelligence and media plan management technology. According to the company's public materials, its proprietary spend and pricing data represents approximately $200 billion in annual media investment across 65 countries worldwide. The company serves C-suite executives at major brands, advertising agencies, and media properties, with clients including companies such as McDonald's, Adidas, American Express, Google, and Unilever.

The board and senior management team reflects the company's positioning at the intersection of media, technology, and finance. According to the company's board and leadership documentation, the team includes Scott Knoll as Chairman, who brings over three decades of experience in advertising and technology. Vince Mifsud serves as CEO, with over two decades of experience in scaling enterprise software companies globally. Other board members include Rob Norman, former Chief Digital Officer at GroupM, and Susan Vobejda, former Chief Marketing Officer at The Trade Desk. James Fennessy, former Global CEO of Standard Media Index (SMI), also sits on the board. Private equity firm GTCR holds board representation through Craig A. Bondy, Stephen P. Master, and Michael B. Pappas.

That combination of backgrounds - agency leadership, digital advertising platform experience, and private equity - shapes the product philosophy. SQADCosts has historically served both the buy side and the sell side, which is unusual for a benchmarking product. Most data services are designed for one side of the market or the other. The Average / Low / High framework is specifically described in the announcement as supporting "the everyday questions buyers and sellers must answer as they plan and transact media inventory."

Technical design decisions

Several technical decisions in the product are worth examining in detail.

The choice to normalize to P2+ and A18+ as the broad-audience baseline is notable. These are the widest demographic cuts, covering persons 2 and older, and adults 18 and older. Narrower audience segments - 25-54, adults with children, high-income households - carry CPM premiums that vary by publisher and format. By anchoring benchmarks to the broadest available cuts, Guideline is reporting floor-level pricing for audience targeting, which gives buyers a consistent starting point regardless of their specific target.

The entertainment versus sports content breakout is also significant. Sports content commands different pricing from general entertainment inventory across virtually every video platform. Live sports rights are expensive to acquire, sports audiences are highly engaged, and advertisers place a premium on adjacency to live events. Collapsing entertainment and sports into a single average would distort the benchmark for any buyer whose plan tilts heavily toward one or the other. Separating them preserves the utility of the data for both.

Ad length breakouts address a similar issue. A 15-second unit and a 30-second unit are not interchangeable from a pricing perspective. Most programmatic video inventory is sold in seconds-based increments, and CPMs adjust accordingly. Reporting averages across lengths would produce a figure that matches neither the 15-second nor the 30-second market exactly.

Monthly reporting cadence - rather than quarterly or annual - means the benchmarks will reflect seasonal price movements in the market. CTV CPMs fluctuate considerably across the year, spiking around political advertising cycles, the fourth-quarter holiday period, and major sports events. Monthly data will capture those patterns in a way that annual averages cannot.

Availability

The product is available now, positioned as an extension to the existing SQADCosts Local solution rather than a standalone product. That means organizations already using SQADCosts Local for linear benchmarking can add the Digital Extension to an existing relationship, which lowers the operational friction of adoption.

Guideline has not disclosed pricing for the extension in the announcement. The company directs interested parties to its website at guideline.ai for additional information.

Why this matters for the ad market

Pricing transparency has different effects depending on where you sit in the transaction. For buyers, reliable benchmarks reduce the risk of overpaying for inventory they cannot easily evaluate independently. Local geo-targeted digital buys have always carried more uncertainty than national buys, because the supply and demand dynamics are narrower and harder to observe. A buyer planning a campaign across 15 DMAs in CTV, audio streaming, and podcasting currently has no consistent way to assess whether the CPMs they are quoted reflect market rates or seller opportunism.

For sellers, the calculus is different. Some publishers may prefer opacity, particularly if their inventory commands premium rates. Others may see value in transparency as a tool for market development - establishing that digital local inventory is worth a specific range of CPMs, and making that case to buyers who might otherwise default to linear television out of familiarity.

The broader trend in the CTV market has been toward more pricing structure, not less. As PPC Land has covered, buyers are pushing for fewer intermediary hops and more direct comparability across publishers. TriCoast Media's April 2026 announcement around lower CPMs through supply chain compression reflects the same underlying pressure. IAB Europe's April 2026 programmatic CTV guide, covered by PPC Land, argued explicitly that CPM alone is not a reliable proxy for value in CTV, underscoring the need for normalized, comparable data rather than raw price figures.

Guideline is not operating in isolation. The company is responding to a market that has spent years building programmatic infrastructure for digital video and audio without building the pricing reference layer that linear television has had for decades. The Digital Extension is an attempt to close that gap for the segment of the market most likely to feel it acutely - local-first buyers and sellers operating below the national campaign threshold.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Guideline, a global ad intelligence and media plan management technology company headquartered in New York, led by CEO Vince Mifsud. The company tracks approximately $200 billion in annual media investment across 65 countries.

What: The launch of the SQADCosts Local Digital Extension, a new product that reports geo-targeted CPM benchmarks for Connected TV, digital video, audio streaming, and podcasting across the top 60+ U.S. publishers. Benchmarks are expressed in Guideline's existing Average / Low / High framework, normalized to locally geo-targeted placements with broad-audience targeting (P2+, A18+), broken out by ad length and Entertainment versus Sports content, and reported monthly.

When: Announced April 30, 2026. The product is available immediately as an extension to existing SQADCosts Local subscriptions.

Where: The product covers the U.S. market exclusively, focusing on locally geo-targeted inventory across the top 60+ video and audio publishers operating in the country.

Why: Local-first buyers have lacked digital pricing intelligence calibrated to geo-targeted buys, while national digital benchmarks offer limited utility when campaigns are narrowed to specific DMAs or regions. Sellers competing for local and regional advertising dollars have similarly lacked a shared reference for market pricing. The Digital Extension extends an established linear benchmarking standard into channels that have grown rapidly without comparable pricing transparency.

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