What Is Borrell Associates and What Does It Provide?

Borrell Associates is a research and data firm that tracks and forecasts local advertising and marketing spending across U.S. markets. It is useful if you need to understand what businesses in a specific geography spend on advertising and marketing, whether you are planning media sales, benchmarking a market, or building a local marketing strategy. Access to its market-level data is subscription-based, and some reports are sold individually.

What Borrell Associates covers

Borrell's focus is local — not national — advertising and marketing. Its stated expertise is knowing what businesses spend on advertising and marketing in any U.S. market, and it positions itself for both macro trend questions and single-market specifics.

Its data covers:

• Advertising (media) spending across dozens of media types
• Other marketing spending, including event sponsorships, promotional items, and printed materials
• Geography down to the county level, configurable for any U.S. market
• More than 20 million U.S. businesses and 100 types of businesses through its Compass product

Core products

Compass

Compass is Borrell's product for tracking and forecasting ad spending. According to the site, it offers directional insights on spending patterns for more than 20 million U.S. businesses, and is customizable by geography (down to county level), by 100 business types, and across dozens of media and marketing expenditure categories. There is a separate Compass login.

Local Scope

Local Scope profiles the customers of a local business using cellphone activity data, delivering demographic profiles. Borrell describes it as a way to understand the unique competitive landscape of any local business. It is listed as a newer product on the site.

Reports and insights

Borrell publishes reports, industry papers, and research. Its flagship is the annual report — the 2026 edition is titled "The Digital Boom Ends, The Battle for Market Share Begins." It is a 65-page analysis with 42 charts and tables on local digital advertising growth, plus two appendices: growth in business locations for 370 MSAs, and "obtainable" digital revenue across 511 U.S. Digital Marketing Regions. Individual reports can be added to a cart, and some content sits behind a subscription login.

Podcast and recurring content

Borrell also produces a podcast on local marketing (including an episode on how local marketing built the Cheerwine brand), plus recurring items such as "Corey's Local Marketing Minute," a Chart of the Week, Local Marketing Trends, and Local Scope Surveys. You can sign up for research alerts to be notified when new content is released.

How access works

Subscription plans are listed on a dedicated page. The site shows separate logins for Compass and for the website, and prompts visitors to log in if they have a Borrell subscription. Pricing details are not specified in the available site information, so check the subscription plans page for current terms.

Who it is for

Borrell's data is most relevant if you work in or with local media, local marketing, or market research — for example, a media company sizing digital revenue opportunity in a set of markets, an agency benchmarking client spend against a market, or an analyst tracking where local ad dollars are moving. If you only need national advertising figures, this is not the right fit, since the entire dataset is organized around U.S. local markets.

To start, decide whether you need ongoing market-level access (subscription) or a single report, then check the subscription plans page or the latest reports listing for current options.