The scent of burnt coffee lingered in the air, mingling with printer toner and the hum of the servers. The Ad Ops floor at Westwood One was usually chaotic by 9 a.m.—phones ringing, schedulers arguing over slot priorities, sales assistants chasing missing scripts. But this morning was… quiet. Unsettlingly quiet.
Denise Moore, Senior Scheduler for the Midwest Region, stared at her monitor in disbelief. The blue-gray glow of her CRT screen made the numbers seem even more surreal.
"Tom," she said, not looking up, "am I hallucinating, or did Ford just slot a full quarter's campaign without talking to us?"
Tom Chen wheeled over from his desk, holding a bagel in one hand and his ever-present coffee mug in the other. "Define 'talking to us.'" He squinted at her screen. "Holy crap. Is that seventy-eight stations?"
"Seventy-eight," Denise confirmed. "Full spread. Prime drive-time across the Midwest and South. The damn thing even dodged the college football blackouts in Louisville."
Tom leaned closer. The campaign dashboard was unlike anything he'd seen. Time slots were matched to listener demographics with eerie precision. Creative audio files were already queued and tagged with market-specific versions. Regions with higher truck sales had different intro copy than coastal cities.
At the top of the page, a label pulsed quietly:Scheduled by: AdNova ET – 4:13 a.m. Optimization Score: 96.7%
"Okay," Tom muttered, awestruck. "That's... terrifyingly competent."
"That's not even the freaky part," Denise said, clicking into a second tab. "Check the pricing."
Tom blinked. The same 30-second spot was sold at different rates across regions—but not arbitrarily. Urban areas with peak congestion during commute hours were priced higher. Smaller towns were discounted, but bundled with regional clusters that improved reach.
"Dynamic pricing," Tom breathed. "It's demand-based."
"Yeah," Denise said, voice low. "And it worked. The total revenue from this one campaign is 12% higher than our average Q1 national buy."
She paused. "And we didn't even negotiate it."
Across the floor, other schedulers were beginning to murmur. Screens were lighting up with similar alerts — campaigns appearing from regional auto dealers, healthcare networks, and even an online university in Phoenix.
Ramon, the head of Affiliate Relations, popped his head up from his cubicle. "Hey, Denise, did you push the North Texas slot for that Ford run?"
"Nope," she called back. "AdNova did."
Ramon blinked. "Seriously?"
"Seriously."
A younger scheduler, Beth, walked over holding a printout. "I just got a confirmation from our Las Vegas affiliate. They approved the Kellogg's back-to-school campaign AdNova submitted at 4:00 a.m. They're happy with the slotting—and get this—Kellogg's loaded the creative themselves."
Tom whistled. "Advertiser self-service."
Denise leaned back in her chair, slowly. "They don't need us to hold their hand anymore."
Ramon joined them, folding his arms. "That's good, right? More campaigns, fewer bottlenecks."
"Yeah," Denise replied, "but this changes the game. National buys used to be handcrafted. Custom. Now? They're scalable. Like software."
She pulled up another report—a heatmap glowing red in the Northeast and blue in the Plains states. "This is engagement prediction," she murmured. "AdNova's giving us feedback loops. Real-time insights on listener response per market, per slot."
Tom leaned forward. "So we're not just selling time anymore. We're selling data-informed outcomes."
Ramon nodded slowly. "And advertisers can cross-sell into digital now, right? I saw the Gannett notes—Ford's getting banner placement through DoubleClick in the same zip codes where their radio ads run."
Denise glanced around the room. People weren't panicked—but they weren't relaxed either. There was a kind of reverent unease in the air, like they'd just watched a magic trick and realized it wasn't magic—it was math.
"Look," she said finally, "radio's not dying. But it's changing. Fast. This... this makes us relevant again."
Ramon gave a small laugh. "When I started here, we were fighting for scraps against TV. Now we're running AI-optimized national campaigns before breakfast."
Tom raised his mug. "To the future."
Denise smiled, but there was steel behind it. "To staying ahead of it."
Behind them, more campaigns poured in. McDonald's testing regional drive-thru spots. GEICO targeting college towns. Even a yoga studio in Vermont running ads during late-night meditation programs.
Beth leaned over. "Should we tell the sales reps?"
"No," Denise said. "Let them notice. They'll hear about it from the clients first anyway."
She didn't say another word. Just leaned back, hands folded behind her head, eyes tracing the AdNova heatmap as it updated in real-time.
Bright red pulses spread across the Midwest and the South — Dallas, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Orlando. Radio campaigns were launching without a single phone call.
Across the floor, someone shouted, "Another Ford slot just filled—Wichita this time!"And then another voice: "Target just booked a back-to-school blitz across twelve states."
The AdOps floor of Westwood One was humming, but no one was talking about press statements or sales decks. They were just watching the system work.
In the far corner, someone's desk phone rang.
"Yeah, this is Jamie." A pause. Then, a confused laugh. "Uh, no… no, we didn't pitch you. You booked through AdNova?"
Another pause.
"Well, welcome aboard. Yeah — I guess we're doing business now."
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away — down the coast, under a hotter sun and slower ceiling fans — another set of screens was lighting up.
Scott Landry, Regional Sales Manager for Gannett Tampa, stood in front of a flatscreen TV bolted to the wall. The conference room smelled of ink, coffee, and quiet disbelief.
"We didn't touch a phone," Scott said, pointing his laser at the display. "Didn't write a pitch deck. Didn't even know they were shopping for ads."
The campaign report glowed on screen. A local bridal jeweler had purchased a full-page print placement in the Sunday Life & Style section — scheduled two weeks out from peak wedding season. But that wasn't all.
"They ran a digital banner campaign too," said Jason, flipping through a deck of screenshots. "City portal homepage, mobile push ad, and fifteen-thousand geo-fenced impressions tied to bridal boutiques within five zip codes."
Maria — fifty-two years old, twenty-eight of them in print — didn't look up from her notepad. "All of that… was AdNova?"
"All of it," Scott said. "System scanned available inventory, matched to likely buying intent, bundled the deal, and offered dynamic pricing based on urgency and region."
He turned to the team. "They clicked once and got full-spectrum coverage. Print, digital, even radio in some cases."
Jason tapped his screen. "AdNova ET planned it, AdNova SS executed it. No rep involved. Just one login."
The room fell silent.
Maria raised a hand, like a teacher asking her own question. "But what if they had questions? What if the system pitched something wrong?"
Scott smiled. "It didn't. Because it's not just matching demographics anymore. It's reading behavior. Reading tone. Looking at article headlines, trending content. It knows this region better than some of our account execs."
He clicked to the next slide — a heatmap of available ad inventory across USA Today, The Tampa Sentinel, and local radio spots.
"This isn't just Tampa," he said. "AdNova links all Gannett properties. Newspapers, TV stations, even local radio partners. One buy — full national access. A brand can cover Los Angeles to Tallahassee with one click."
Maria leaned back. "So we're not selling column inches anymore. We're selling a network."
Scott nodded. "Exactly. We've gone from ink and airtime… to intelligence."
Jason grinned. "It's why Campbell's Soup just booked a six-market buy across newspaper, TV, and digital — and no one from New York even called us. They did it through AdNova last night. Auto-approved."
Scott scrolled to a dashboard labeled "Sell-Through Efficiency." A bar chart showed a dramatic rise in filled ad inventory across multiple publications.
"We're not sitting on unsold back pages anymore," he said. "AdNova uses leftover inventory like airlines use empty seats. Dynamic rates, last-minute packaging, predictive discounts."
A younger rep raised her hand. "What does that mean for us, though? The reps?"
Scott didn't blink. "It means fewer cold calls. More strategy. We help clients who want help — the system handles the rest. Small businesses, mid-sized brands, realtors, wedding vendors — they can launch campaigns without ever picking up a phone."
He paused, letting the shift settle into the room like a second sunrise.
"Think about it. Before this, national ad buys had to go through corporate. Now any advertiser can access national reach. Local clients can test new markets. Gannett's scale is now liquid."
Maria raised an eyebrow. "And Hearst? Tribune? They've got nothing like this?"
Scott smiled. "They're still building proprietary stacks. We just leapfrogged them. AdNova's tech-forward, scalable, and we didn't have to sink a million dollars to invent it."
A silence passed — not tense, not anxious. Just contemplative. Change humming in the walls.
Finally, Jason looked up. "What do we tell the clients now?"
Scott nodded, stepping back and folding his arms.
"We tell them they're no longer just buying ads. They're buying relevance. Efficiency. Reach. We're not selling space. We're selling outcomes."
Outside, a FedEx van unloaded bundles of the morning paper. Inside, Gannett's future was no longer printed. It was computed, coded, and self-optimizing.
And Tampa was only the beginning.