Madhive, the New York-based demand-side platform built for local media companies, announced on May 12, 2026, the appointment of Luke Valvano as its Chief Financial Officer. Valvano arrives from Intersection, where he served as CFO and as Treasurer of the affiliated entity CityBridge, after more than two decades working across financial strategy, audit, and media operations. The hire adds a senior finance executive to a company that now employs over 400 people and powers more than 50,000 campaigns for local broadcasters and agencies every day.

The announcement marks a deliberate move by Madhive at a moment when the local media advertising sector is facing structural pressure from AI-driven automation, fragmented measurement systems, and the accelerating migration of audiences from linear television to streaming platforms.

The appointment

According to Madhive, Valvano will oversee the company's financial strategy and execution in his new role. His mandate sits squarely at the intersection of finance and product growth, supporting what the company describes as a high-velocity transition of local media sales toward AI-driven planning, activation, and measurement. That phrasing is significant. Madhive is not positioning this as a steady-state finance hire. The CFO role, as framed, carries operational weight in shaping how the company scales its AI product suite.

Jim Wilson, CEO of Madhive, commented on the appointment: "Madhive's mission is to empower the evolution of local media and our appointment of Luke as CFO strengthens our leadership team to deliver on that mission. Luke's trusted leadership spanning both financial strategy and a broader advertising ecosystem makes him uniquely suited to joining us as we drive our next chapter of omnichannel growth."

Valvano, for his part, framed the opportunity around technology: "Madhive has created a market-leading DSP that redefined what is possible for local media. As CFO, I am excited to help lead a company that prioritizes its evolving solutions including Maverick's AI solutions and other technological innovation and operational automation and excellence. We are giving local media the sophisticated technology to turn complex digital strategies into measurable, high-growth results that protect and expand their bottom line."

The mention of Maverick is notable. Madhive's AI product suite operates under that name, covering planning, activation, and measurement functions within the platform's end-to-end infrastructure.

Who is Luke Valvano?

Valvano's career began at KPMG, where he worked across two divisions. According to his LinkedIn profile, he joined KPMG Audit in September 2005, spending two years and one month in that role before transitioning to KPMG Transaction and Restructuring Services in 2007, where he remained until March 2010 - a period of three years and three months. Those early years gave him grounding in transaction advisory work, a discipline that involves evaluating business value, financial risk, and capital structure under conditions of change.

From KPMG, Valvano moved into senior leadership roles at Titan and Great Bowery, both of which operate in media-adjacent sectors. Titan is a large-format out-of-home advertising company with a presence across major US markets; Great Bowery is a creative talent agency serving the media and entertainment industries. These positions extended his financial expertise into advertising infrastructure and media production - neither of which follows the clean reporting lines of corporate finance.

His most recent role before Madhive was at Intersection, where he served as CFO of the company and Treasurer of CityBridge, Intersection's sister entity. Intersection is a significant operator in the out-of-home and urban technology space. The company manages LinkNYC, the publicly visible network of digital kiosks across New York City that replaced payphones with free gigabit Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging, and digital advertising screens. Intersection operates over 6,500 digital out-of-home screens in high-density urban environments including New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The company was the subject of a VIOOH partnership announced in July 2024, which extended its inventory into programmatic DOOH buying through VIOOH's real-time trading infrastructure.

At Intersection and CityBridge, Valvano managed global financial operations and guided the companies through what Madhive describes as a period of transformation, growth, and significant capital activity. What that means in practice is navigating the kind of financial complexity that comes with large municipal contracts, hardware deployment at scale, and programmatic advertising revenue - all simultaneously. That background is directly transferable to Madhive's own situation, where revenue flows from a mix of managed services, self-serve platform fees, and AI-enabled campaign products.

Madhive's platform and scale

Madhive positions itself as the only unified ad platform built specifically for local media companies, rather than adapted from a general-purpose programmatic stack. That is a meaningful distinction. Most large DSPs - The Trade Desk, Google DV360, Amazon DSP - were architected for national or global brand advertisers, with local market targeting added as a feature rather than a foundation. Madhive, by contrast, built its platform around the workflow requirements of local broadcasters, regional agencies, and market-specific advertisers.

The platform covers the full campaign lifecycle. From the front end, it handles proposal generation and planning - the stage at which local media sales teams put together advertising packages for clients. That feeds into omnichannel buying across digital inventory, real-time optimization as campaigns run, and measurement at the back end. According to Madhive, the workflow software integrates into existing systems that local media companies already use, rather than requiring a wholesale replacement of their technology stack.

The client roster reflects the company's positioning in the local broadcast market. Fox, Hearst, and News-Press & Gazette are named as clients. These are companies that operate local television stations and digital properties across multiple markets. Their advertising sales operations depend on tools that can manage high volumes of small-to-medium campaigns across geographically defined audiences - a fundamentally different operating environment from managing a single national brand's programmatic spend.

The 50,000+ campaigns per day figure that Madhive cites puts some texture on the operational scale. Local media advertising is high-volume and lower-unit-value compared to premium national buys. Managing that volume efficiently requires automation at the campaign management layer, which is precisely where Madhive's Maverick AI system is being deployed.

Why a CFO hire signals a growth phase

Senior executive appointments at companies of Madhive's scale are rarely administrative. A CFO appointment at a 400-person ad tech company typically precedes or accompanies one of three things: a fundraising round, an acquisition, or a push toward profitability ahead of an eventual exit. Madhive has not disclosed which, if any, of these is immediately on the horizon. But Valvano's background at KPMG Transaction Services - where the explicit work is advising on mergers, acquisitions, and capital events - alongside his experience navigating significant capital activity at Intersection, suggests he is not being brought in solely for routine financial reporting.

The local media sector has been under structural pressure for years. Traditional local television advertising revenue has declined as audiences fragment across streaming platforms. Mediaocean survey data from early 2026 showed that 36% of marketers planned to decrease local TV spend, the sharpest planned decrease of any media format alongside print at 49%. Local radio faced similar headwinds. Against that backdrop, the value proposition Madhive is selling - that local media companies can recapture and grow revenue by adopting AI-driven programmatic tools - is being tested in real market conditions.

Madhive's own analysis, cited in PPC Land coverage of the Fubo and Hulu + Live TV merger, noted that nearly half of US marketers struggle with transparency and accountability in streaming campaigns. That measurement problem is central to Madhive's sales pitch for its platform: the ability to deliver outcomes measurement across both linear and streaming inventory from a unified system.

The broader DSP landscape is consolidating around CTV and AI capabilities. The Trade Desk launched its Ventura Ecosystem in February 2026, bringing together V's 50 million-device operating system and Nexxen's full-stack ad technology into a shared CTV marketplace. Walmart Connect launched its Connect Select CTV marketplace in late April 2026, embedding programmatic CTV buying directly inside its DSP alongside first-party retail data. Mediaocean announced Prisma Direct in March 2026, targeting the automation of direct TV ad transactions with Disney as its first integration partner. Each of these moves addresses a different layer of the CTV infrastructure stack.

Madhive's position in this landscape is not general-purpose CTV. It is local media specifically. That niche has different economics and different competitive dynamics than national CTV buying. A local broadcaster selling advertising for a station in Des Moines or Albuquerque is competing for budgets that are locally bounded, often sold by sales teams who are accustomed to direct relationships rather than programmatic buying desks. Getting those teams to operate through an AI-enabled DSP requires both product investment and trust - which explains why Madhive's client expansion strategy has centered on companies like Fox and Hearst, large broadcast groups that have the organizational capacity to adopt new platform tools at scale.

The OOH and digital background

Valvano's experience at Intersection and in the OOH sector also aligns with a less-discussed aspect of Madhive's platform: the extension of local media advertising beyond television into digital out-of-home and other channels. Madhive's platform is described as omnichannel, meaning it is not restricted to CTV or digital video. The local media companies it serves often have advertising inventory across multiple formats - digital, broadcast, audio, and increasingly DOOH as urban screen networks expand. Having a CFO who understands the financial and operational mechanics of OOH media infrastructure, having lived them at Intersection, is not incidental to Madhive's stated omnichannel growth agenda.

The programmatic DOOH sector has developed rapidly. According to VIOOH and Intersection's 2024 partnership coverage on PPC Land, Intersection's network spans over 6,500 digital screens in major American cities, operating through VIOOH's real-time trading infrastructure. That network - and the financial model that sustains it - was part of Valvano's operational responsibility at his previous role.

Maverick and the AI product layer

Valvano's quote specifically names Maverick, Madhive's AI product suite, as a priority area. The Maverick name covers the AI-driven planning, activation, and measurement functions that Madhive has been building into its platform. These are not simple algorithmic optimization features of the kind that every DSP now claims. According to Madhive, Maverick is designed to allow local media sellers to automate complex campaign workflows - generating proposals, optimizing placements across channels in real time, and delivering measurement that ties ad exposure to business outcomes at the local market level.

Madhive's Aaron Brown was listed as a key contributor to the IAB Tech Lab's AI in Advertising Primer, published in October 2024, alongside contributors from GroupM, Google, and Meta. That participation indicates Madhive's engagement with industry-level AI standards development - a posture consistent with a company building AI infrastructure rather than simply deploying third-party models for campaign optimization.

The AI planning and activation layer is where the competition between platforms is sharpening most visibly. Marketers are under pressure to demonstrate efficiency gains from AI tools, and IAB Europe's programmatic day in April 2026surfaced a clear industry concern: automation must not come at the cost of transparency. DSPs that deploy agentic AI for campaign buying face questions about which party bears responsibility when autonomous systems make decisions. For Madhive, whose clients are local media companies with limited programmatic expertise, the trust dimension of AI deployment is particularly consequential.

Implications for the marketing community

The appointment of a CFO with deep roots in OOH, digital media finance, and transaction advisory work tells a particular story about where Madhive sees itself in the next several years. The company is not hiring for steady-state management. It is hiring for change - whether that means capital events, acquisitions, or a significant scaling of its platform business.

For agencies and media buyers operating in local markets, the Madhive trajectory is worth tracking. The local DSP space has been less consolidated than national programmatic buying, in part because the technical and workflow requirements are genuinely different. A platform that can handle the proposal-to-measurement workflow for a local broadcaster - including integration with existing traffic and sales systems - addresses a gap that general-purpose DSPs have historically left open.

The 50,000+ daily campaigns that Madhive claims to power, combined with clients of the scale of Fox and Hearst, give the company a data asset that is specific to local media behavior. How Madhive monetizes that asset through its AI systems - and how it finances the infrastructure required to scale them - is the question that Valvano's appointment is designed to answer.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Luke Valvano, a financial executive with over 20 years of experience across KPMG, Titan, Great Bowery, and Intersection, has been appointed Chief Financial Officer of Madhive. Jim Wilson is Madhive's CEO.

What: Madhive named Valvano as CFO, assigning him responsibility for the company's financial strategy and execution. His mandate explicitly covers the financial architecture supporting Madhive's AI product suite, Maverick, and the broader transition of local media sales toward programmatic, AI-driven workflows.

When: The appointment was announced on May 12, 2026.

Where: Madhive is headquartered in New York. The company operates nationally, serving local broadcasters and agencies across the United States.

Why: Madhive is scaling its platform at a moment of significant structural change in local media advertising. Linear television budgets are under pressure, local media companies are adopting programmatic tools to compete for digital budgets, and AI is being deployed across planning, activation, and measurement functions. Bringing in a CFO with transaction advisory experience and OOH media finance expertise positions the company for the capital activity - whether fundraising, acquisitions, or growth financing - that scaling an AI-enabled DSP requires.

Share this article
The link has been copied!