What AI Media Tools Miss: the Opportunity That Creates for Local Advertisers

In 2025, Futuri Media fed media planning prompts to eight AI systems (GPT-4o, Gemini, Grok, Claude, Perplexity, and others) across 20,000 generated plans covering 60 business sectors, budgets ranging from $25,000 to $10 million, at both national and local market levels.

Radio appeared in just 3% of plans. Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude excluded radio in 100% of the plans they generated. Digital video dominated, appearing in 80–99% of plans. A $150,000 campaign for a home improvement brand in Phoenix — a driving market not unlike Boise — came back with zero allocation to radio or television.

This isn't a quirk. It's a structural feature of how AI planning tools work. And it's steering advertisers toward a strategy that decades of marketing effectiveness research says is quietly destroying brands.

Why AI Can't See Radio

AI media planning tools learn from data. Google's ecosystem has thousands of documented, measurable case studies: clicks, conversions, cost-per-acquisition, ROAS. The feedback loop is clean and abundant.

Radio's effectiveness data exists, but it's sparse, inconsistently formatted, and rarely structured in a way AI systems can parse. There's no pixel on a radio ad. Measurement requires separate tools and deliberate methodology, none of which feeds back into the AI's training data automatically.

The result, as Futuri's research describes it, is an "algorithmic snowball": AI directs budgets to digital, more digital data accumulates, that data reinforces the AI's digital bias, repeat. Futuri projects that if AI adoption in media planning reaches 60% — which it's on track to do — radio could lose $6 billion in annual ad revenue by 2028. Not because radio stopped working. Because it became invisible to the tools making the decisions.

What AI Actually Optimizes For

Google's Performance Max and Meta's Advantage+, the two dominant AI-driven ad platforms, are engineered around a single objective: conversion signals. The algorithm is extraordinarily good at finding people who are likely to convert right now.

That is not the same thing as building a brand.

One paid media agency founder analyzed roughly 40 Performance Max campaigns across dozens of companies and found only one showed genuine profitability. The pattern in the others: PMax absorbs branded search clicks — conversions that were already going to happen because the consumer already knew the brand — then claims credit for them. Meta Advantage+ does the same, spending most of its budget on retargeting rather than discovering new prospects.

These platforms are not growing your customer base. They are efficiently harvesting demand that already exists — demand that someone, somewhere, created through brand-building. When there's no brand-building in the plan, these tools are consuming seed corn.

In a single year, brand investment dropped below one-third of total ad spend. The recommended ratio, established by Les Binet and Peter Field through the world's largest database of marketing effectiveness case studies, is 60% brand building, 40% direct response. The industry is now running the inverse.

The Death Spiral

At the IPA Effectiveness Conference in October 2025, Les Binet named what's happening directly.

"Budget is eight times more important than ROI," he said. "Yet 65% of marketers say ROI is most important and only 35% say budget."

Since COVID, marketing ROI has risen 4%. Net profit generated by marketing has fallen 11%. The industry is getting more efficient at doing less.

Binet called it a death spiral: optimize for ROI, cut reach and scale, weaken the brand's presence in people's minds, force more reliance on performance tactics to make up the gap, repeat.

Researchers at the University of South Australia have documented the mechanism for decades: brands grow by being the first name someone thinks of at the moment they need what you sell. That recognition requires wide reach, consistent exposure, and reaching people who are not currently in-market — the light buyers and non-buyers who represent the majority of future growth.

Narrow targeting — the core feature of every AI performance tool — systematically fails to do this. It finds the people most likely to convert today and ignores the light buyers and non-buyers who represent the majority of future growth.

What Happens to Brands That Go Dark

Researchers tracked 41 brands across the alcohol category over nearly two decades. Brands that stopped advertising saw:

A Harvard Business Review analysis of three separate recessions found that 80% of companies that cut marketing costs had not regained pre-recession sales and profits within three years of the recession ending. Econometric consultancy Data2Decisions found that negative consequences of going dark are four times more severe in the long run, with a significant delay before the full damage shows up.

Analytic Partners analyzed hundreds of billions in marketing spend across 750+ brands in 45 countries and found that over 60% of brands that increased marketing investment during a recession saw improved ROI and incremental sales. Brands that cut back saw an 18% contraction in incremental sales, two-thirds of which came directly from reduced investment, not from the economy itself.

The Specific Case for Radio in This Equation

Radio is valuable here because it's the highest-reach, lowest-cost-per-point medium for being the first name someone thinks of in a local market — which is exactly what the effectiveness research says brand-building requires.

Peter Field's 2024 analysis of the IPA Databank found that brands using AM/FM radio are +13% more likely to be the first name someone thinks of, +42% greater profit, and +58% lift in brand trust compared to non-radio brands.

In the Treasure Valley, radio holds 86% of in-car ad-supported audio time. It reaches adults during their daily routines, before they're in-market, while purchase intent is still forming. Switching from a performance-only approach to a balanced brand-plus-performance strategy improves total revenue ROI by an average of 90%, according to WARC's 2025 Multiplier Effect research. Brand-building advertising is 60% more effective over the long term than direct-response advertising and only 25% less effective in the short term.

What to Do About It

Performance Max and Advantage+ are legitimate tools for capturing in-market demand — used within a plan that also builds demand. The problem is using them as the plan rather than part of one.

Binet's prescription at the IPA conference: "Go big or go home." Statistically significant sales uplift requires 30–60 million exposures. Major, durable brand results require 200 million or more. Those numbers require scale — the kind that broad-reach audio in a local market actually delivers.

If your current media plan was generated by an AI tool, or by an agency optimizing primarily for trackable conversions, it is almost certainly underinvesting in brand. In a market where your competitors are doing the same thing, the business that holds its brand investment is the one that will be standing when conditions improve.

The data on this isn't new. What's new is that AI is accelerating the mistake at a scale that makes the consequences harder to escape.

Sources: Futuri Media, "The Algorithmic Snowball," July 2025 (20,000+ AI-generated media plans across 8 LLMs and 60 business sectors). Les Binet and Will Davis, IPA Effectiveness Conference, October 2025. WARC, "Performance Budgets Rise at Expense of Brand," November 2024. WARC / Analytic Partners / System1, "The Multiplier Effect," 2025. Analytic Partners ROI Genome Intelligence Report, "The Rules of Recession-Proofing." Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, brand investment withdrawal study (41 brands, 18-year longitudinal). Peter Field / IPA Databank analysis for Westwood One, January 2024. Edison Research Share of Ear®, Q3–Q4 2024. Friday Agency Ireland, "Performance Marketers Are Sleepwalking Into an AI Black Box," 2025.