Locala Appoints Grant Gudgel as Chief Marketing Officer

Business

Locala Appoints Grant Gudgel as Chief Marketing Officer

2026-06-04 22:10 Last Updated At：22:20

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 4, 2026--

Locala today announced the appointment of Grant Gudgel as Chief Marketing Officer, as the company prepares to introduce a sharpened market vision around agentically enabled adaptive advertising.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260603153700/en/

Gudgel joins Locala at a time when advertisers are under growing pressure to adapt to changing market conditions and connect media investment more directly to business outcomes.

“What attracted me to Locala is that it helps brands understand what is happening in each market before media decisions are made,” said Gudgel. “Most platforms focus on buying media more efficiently once a campaign is in-market. Locala starts earlier. By combining business context, market dynamics, competitive signals, consumer behavior, location intelligence, and AI-enabled agents, it helps advertisers turn complex market signals into decisions about where to invest, how to allocate budgets, and how to adapt across thousands of local markets. We call this Adaptive Advertising.”

Gudgel said Locala’s AI-powered agent framework is a key enabler of that approach.

“Locala Agents are what make Adaptive Advertising scalable,” he added. “They help teams continuously analyze market-level business signals, surface opportunities and competitive risks, and make faster, more informed decisions about where and how to invest as conditions change.”

Gudgel brings extensive experience across advertising technology, media, marketing leadership, strategic growth, and M&A. Before joining Locala, he served as SVP Marketing at Verve and previously as SVP and Head of Teads Studio. He has also advised industry players, including Kargo, and private equity groups on growth strategy and M&A opportunities across the advertising technology landscape.

“Grant joins Locala at an important moment for our company and for the advertising industry,” said Christophe Collet, Founder and CEO of Locala. “Advertisers need a more adaptive way to understand markets, connect media to business outcomes, and act as customer behavior changes. Grant brings the strategic clarity, market experience, and category perspective to help us tell that story and accelerate Locala’s next stage of growth.”

About Locala
Locala is the operating layer for Adaptive Advertising, enabling global brands to act on real-world customer journeys, where it matters.

Through its AI-enabled platform, Locala helps brands and agencies understand markets, activate dynamically, and adapt across digital channels. With 14 offices worldwide and extensive real-world audience signals, Locala drives more relevant and efficient advertising outcomes.

Choose ‘Trainspotting’: Ewan McGregor and Danny Boyle reflect on the life-changing film

Ewan McGregor, for a fleeting moment after “Trainspotting” came out, felt like a rock star.

It wasn’t his first significant project; it wasn’t even his first film with director Danny Boyle. And he was, in his words, fairly arrogant and cocksure at the time. But that kinetic film about four heroin addicts in late-1980s Scotland was and, 30 years later, remains defining — in his career, in the culture and in his understanding of what true artistic satisfaction can feel like.

“It’s very much in that early part of my career, and of course, even today, probably the most important piece of work that I was involved in, just because it had such a massive effect on my life. Not only because of what it did, but because of how it felt to make,” McGregor told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “It set the bar unknowingly high because it’s been quite hard to match ever since.”

Both McGregor and Boyle are a little wistful about the time, and what they made, on the eve of its 30th anniversary re-release. Starting Friday, a 4K digital restoration will be in theaters nationwide. Though “Trainspotting” was very much of its moment with its Britpop soundtrack, its Thatcher-era grit, its darkly comedic tone and shrewd blend of giddy highs and tragic lows, it’s also one that has stood the unforgiving test of time.

“You get kids coming up to you who are 17 who said they’d just seen it,” Boyle said. “I could be their grandfather … yet it still spoke to them.”

Boyle was a hot commodity after “Shallow Grave,” a 1994 black comedy about flatmates in Edinburgh starring McGregor, and Hollywood was calling. Literally. A peak-famous Sharon Stone cold-called him and asked if he’d want to come make a film with her. But he had his sights set on Irvine Welsh’s buzzy debut novel, teaming once again with screenwriter John Hodge and producer Andrew Macdonald.

The budget would be small, 1.5 million pounds or about $1.9 million, and the shoot would be quick and local. They didn’t know what they didn’t know: Boyle remembers asking his cinematographer, the late Brian Tufano, if they could use an anal probe camera for the “worst toilet in Scotland” scene.

“I remember him saying, ‘Well, Danny, yes, you can get that. But I’m not sure how Ewan and his family and agent will feel about that,’” Boyle said with a laugh. “He tempered my kind of extreme way of approaching this material.”

And somehow it all worked, driven by youthful energy, a bit of arrogance and a passionate commitment to the material.

“‘Trainspotting’ had to be made that way,” said McGregor, who was 23 at the time. “It would have been a disaster if it had been done differently.”

For McGregor, at least part of the vitality came from the fact that they were shooting on film; money was going through the camera on every take.

“We shoot on these cards now, and it just doesn’t matter anymore,” McGregor said. “There’s no natural sort of like rhythm to filmmaking like there used to be then. … I think back to ‘Shallow Grave’ and ‘Trainspotting’ and it feels almost like a different job.”

Boyle too has been chasing that kind of innocence ever since. He said he might have come close on his upcoming film “Ink,” with Jack O’Connell.

“It was liberating not having enough money because you don’t have that limitation of thinking, oh, that’s going to be too extreme for the studio or for the audience reach we’re meant to have,” Boyle said. “You could make it so that if it didn’t work, you just, you know, sulk away with your tail between your legs and call back Sharon Stone and say ‘I was wrong.’”

Like any film about drugs, there was a fair amount of discourse around its release. U.S. presidential candidate Bob Dole even denounced it, unseen, for romanticizing heroin during his campaign. But the film was in the conversation — and it had an enviable group of supporters, including Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and Blur’s Damon Albarn, both of whom provided songs for the film.

After “Trainspotting” became a hit, life changed profoundly for McGregor. In London, he said, “it was madness.” At the time he was sharing a flat with his co-star Jonny Lee Miller, Jude Law and Sean Pertwee. When they’d go out to clubs, they felt like rock stars.

“There was a real energy around it,” McGregor said. “We were part of that, you see, the Blur and Oasis and Pulp and The Verve and all of that amazing music that was happening then. We were the sort of movie version of it, I guess, because Danny knew what he was doing with the soundtrack and because the novel was so huge and current and … and maybe because it was ours. It was British and it wasn’t pandering to America. We didn’t make it for America.”

Boyle hopes that audiences take a chance on “Trainspotting” in the theater, whether they're revisiting it or seeing it for the first time. It was, he said, made with an absolute love of cinema.

“It’s very indebted to ‘Goodfellas,’ which also has that feeling of: You are here to be absolutely assaulted by an experience,” Boyle said. “You know, you have given us your money and you’ve given us your time to be here for 90 minutes, two hours, whatever it is, and we promise, we promise to deliver everything to you that we can.”