We present arguments which suggest that the bulk higher-spin gravity duals of weakly-coupled conformal field theories obey some refined notion of locality. In particular, we discuss the Mellin amplitude programme in this context. We focus on the O(N) vector model and minimal higher-spin gravity as a paradigmatic example of such holographic dual pairs. We restrict ourselves to three- and fourpoint functions of scalar primary operators, but the qualitative conclusions are expected to hold for the generic case.