A new report from media technology company Futuri warns that as advertisers lean on AI for media planning, a “data famine” for traditional broadcast is causing models to systematically exclude radio and TV, putting billions in future revenue at risk.
The digital divide: Futuri’s analysis of 20,000 AI-generated media plans found that radio appeared in just 3% of budget recommendations, with TV faring only slightly better at 7%. In stark contrast, digital channels like YouTube and connected TV dominated the AI-generated plans, commanding an average budget share of 19%.
Invisible to machines: The report pinpoints the problem not as malicious bias, but as a mechanical one. AI models are trained on oceans of structured performance data from big tech platforms, but the broadcast industry’s effectiveness metrics are often sparse or locked away, rendering them functionally invisible to the machines making the decisions.
Feeding the machine: The proposed solution is an industry-wide effort to publish public, detailed case studies featuring named advertisers and concrete metrics. The goal is to “feed the machine” structured, machine-readable data on open platforms, making broadcast a visible and viable option for AI-driven media plans.
The AI ultimatum: The trend highlights a critical new reality for established industries: if your value isn’t legible to AI, you risk being automated into irrelevance.
The wider view: The warning lands as the ad industry rapidly embraces generative AI for media planning, according to a recent IAB report. Meanwhile, the underlying issue of model fragility—and how easily AI can be manipulated by its training data—remains a subject of wider debate, highlighting the vulnerability that Futuri sees as both a threat and an opportunity.
