Fabio Ferrara

CEO & Founder @AlchemyxAi | AI-Driven Marketing | Rethinking local advertising with AI | 🇮🇹 ITALY 🇮🇹

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

Anyone saying "buy TV" like it is a commodity has already lost the plan. Connected TV in 2026 is not a screen. It is a social device. The mistake is structural.

When a spot airs in the living room, it does not speak to a person. It speaks to a family in interaction. Grandma comments. Kid repeats the line. Dad debates with mom. Message multiplies because the family itself relays it.

Planners who fail at CTV treat the living room as a sum of individuals. It has always been a network of relationships. Different math.

Three practical shifts for an SMB on CTV today.

Spot needs at least one conversational element. A repeating line, a memorable sound, a recognizable gesture. Something the kid uses at dinner. Internal family relay produces free extra exposures, hard to quantify but consistently real.

Prime time is not a daypart, it is an emotional state. Sunday evening hits differently than Tuesday evening, even at the same GRP. Relaxation decides reception.

Second screen is an ally, not an enemy. CTV spot triggers a phone search in the seconds after airing, in a significant share of viewings. Plan for the phone that lights up right after.

The living room is the most underrated emotional device in our craft. Buy it as reach and you pay full price for half the result.

Follow for sharper local plays each week.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

Local radio is measurable in 2026. Most planners do not know it. Even fewer use it.

Three attribution methods that work today for an SMB.

Post-spot geofence. Devices entering the store radius in the hours after the spot airs. Aggregated, anonymous, no consent prompt needed. The signal is clean and operationally usable.

Verbal promo code, radio only. The classic "say Local FM at the register" still works in 2026. Maybe even better than ten years ago, because almost nobody else is using it.

Brand search spike. The spot airs at 8:42 AM. The brand search curve lifts within fifteen minutes. Clean, undisputable, repeatable across weeks.

What makes local radio structurally different is not the audience size. It is proximity trust. An audience listening as part of daily habit, in the car on the commute, in the store at work, not as passive distraction in a feed.

For a small business this translates into something digital cannot replicate. People who walk into the store because they recognize the brand, not because they clicked an ad.

In 2026, planning local radio without measuring is leaving half the value on the table. The measurement is there. The methods work. The mistake is not using them.

Follow for sharper local plays each week.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

Three media on the same week, same budget, different sequence. Three completely different results. Sequencing is not a planning detail. It is the variable that decides if the campaign works.

I see this in local plans every season. Most planners stack channels in a calendar. Slot A radio. Slot B DOOH. Slot C search. Three independent tracks running in parallel and calling it a campaign.

That is scheduling, not sequencing.

The working sequence for an SMB local is almost always the same shape.

Start with the medium that builds local salience. Radio at drive time gets the brand into the head before any other touchpoint.

Continue with the medium that builds context. DOOH on mid-week, with the same message visible at the intersection or the entrance to the shopping zone.

Close with the medium that intercepts intent. Search and social in the final days, when the SMB knows the consumer is now actively looking.

For a local consumer the brain needs three steps to consolidate a brand. Listen. Recognize in physical space. Search when intent is concrete. Skip a step and the campaign loses force.

AI on local plans does not replace this strategy. It makes it executable at a speed manual planning cannot match. The right sequence exists. AI calibrates it day by day on actual response.

If you plan local with three media in a week and you do not think about sequence, you are leaving most of the budget on the floor.

Follow for sharper local plays each week.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

Three different clients, same mistake. "Buy the totems with the most impressions." Wrong answer for local DOOH. Right answer for national billboards. Two different jobs.

Summer SMB season opens next week. Every DOOH plan I see starts from impression counts. That is highway billboard logic, not sidewalk logic.

Right surface is not the most seen. It is the one that intercepts the decision, not the attention. Confusing the two costs SMBs the season.

Rule one. Distance from point of sale. A totem 200m from the ice cream shop converts more than one 2km away in a fancier district. Proximity is data, not detail.

Rule two. Directionality of pedestrian flow. Right sidewalk and left sidewalk behave differently. Flow toward the lake is not flow back from the lake. Plan blind here and you lose.

Rule three. Hourly density matched to product. Ice cream pushed at 8 AM is wasted money. Same totem at 5 PM is gold. No time slots = old billboard logic.

14 weeks of summer separate the plan built on impressions from the plan built on decision. Margin of the season.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

Same city. Two completely different audiences. That is what local planning has been waiting on.

In the US, CTV addressable is already a standard line in SMB mixes. In Italy, leading national broadcasters are bringing the same logic to the local market. A small business can now buy households by ZIP, daypart, behavioral profile. Pay only for the people who actually enter the catchment.

Three practical shifts for a local SMB.

Targeting moves from generic demographic to geographic-behavioral. Brooklyn 35-50 family is no longer a buy. Brooklyn families with grocery spend over X are.

Same city plans can split by neighborhood. The Williamsburg message and the Park Slope message do not need to be the same anymore.

Cost per household reached becomes measurable, not estimated. Different math entirely.

Important to be precise. CTV addressable is not a replacement for national TV. It is a complement. National brings brand consistency at scale. Addressable brings local precision. Different jobs, different tools.

For an SMB local, this is the first time the medium reads as accessible. Same content, finally segmentable.

Follow for sharper local plays each week.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

The same radio spot for a full week, on every station, in every daypart. Decades of local advertising ran on this model.

Worked. Not anymore.

Generative AI is quietly rewriting the local radio playbook. The same creative idea now lives as multiple variants, each calibrated to a specific context: the station's catchment, the time of day, the tone of the host. For a small business that buys local radio, this is a structural shift.

Same budget. Message tuned to context, not generic copy cut for nobody specifically.

The three rules I apply to local radio plans in 2026. One strong core idea, declined in multiple voices. Adaptation by key daypart, not by individual spot. Brand coherence across every variant.

Radio is still the medium best suited to build emotional proximity with a local community. That has not changed. What has changed is the cost of doing it well. Generative AI made it accessible to budgets that could never afford multiple creative tracks.

If you plan local radio in 2026 like you planned it in 2018, the medium did not get worse. The market got faster.

Follow for sharper local plays each week.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

A single channel feels efficient. It is almost always the plan that fails first.

I see SMBs do this every week. Everything on Meta. Or all on Google. Or all on radio. One channel feels controllable, but it is a fragile bet.

The reason is cognitive. A local customer needs to see the same message in three different contexts before the brand reads as real. Car radio on the commute, urban totem at the light, Saturday cinema spot. Only then does recognition kick in.

The same budget spread across three channels travels further than the same budget concentrated on one. Not magic. Consistent repetition in different contexts that the brain reads as real brand presence.

Local multichannel is not enterprise marketing. It is coherent repetition in three contexts, which is the minimum a small business budget deserves.

Follow for sharper local plays each week.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

A digital totem is not a small billboard. Most US planners still cram a 14x48 highway file into a 75-inch screen 6 feet from a pedestrian's face. The medium goes mute.

Urban DOOH is an intimate medium. Close up. Standing still. 4 seconds max. It is the threshold of a bagel shop, not the threshold of I-95.

Rule one. One idea per frame. Two claims kill the message. Two primary colors kill the message. The brain decodes one signal in 4 seconds.

Rule two. The message changes with the hour. Same totem at 8 AM and at 5 PM is not the same audience. Static creative wastes the entire medium.

Rule three. Readability at 6 feet in 4 seconds. If the claim fails this test, animation and geofence are useless. The basics decide first.

Treat the totem as a new medium, not a downsized billboard. That mindset shift is half the local DOOH work.

More on local plans every week if you want sharper takes.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

73% of US small businesses still think TV is for big brands. In 2026 that is just wrong. AI-powered Addressable TV is now an SMB tool. The unit you buy is a zip code, not a show.

AI rebuilds the household profile in real time. Only aggregated signals. No cookies. No PII. Just affinity at the block level.

The spend floor collapsed. Four months ago you needed 50K to enter. Today campaigns work live at 3 to 5K. The math finally fits a local operator.

Completion rate sits at 94%. Digital is not even in the same neighborhood. The connected TV in the living room is the safest context left in the mix.

A pizza chain in Austin now buys 4 neighborhoods. Nine years ago they had to buy the South. That gap is the actual shift in our craft.

If you plan TV for SMBs and want sharper takes weekly, follow along.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

Local radio is the most underestimated summer media in the US. Not because it is cheap. Because it is the only channel sitting inside the car of a customer literally driving toward your business.

Summer media planning starts with one question. Where is my customer in the 30 minutes before they decide? For local tourism the answer is always the same. In the car. Radio on.

Beach clubs, ice cream shops, lakeside restaurants. The ones that open strong in May all start with the local station. Digital and DOOH come after. Not before.

Treat radio as a sidekick to your social spend and you lose the opening weekend. Start from radio and you build a whole season on top of it.

The unlock in 2026 is local radio geofencing. I know which county, which time slot, which road the spot lands on. For a small business that beats any national plan.

If you plan local for SMBs and this resonates, follow along. I share what is working week by week.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

Local addressable TV is becoming a concrete reality. In markets like the US and UK, advertisers can already show different spots to different households in the same area. It reaches high-attention moments, has precision proximity data, personalizes messaging without privacy violations. In Italy, with Mediaset Ad Manager leading the way, the potential for local SMBs is still largely untapped but the direction is clear.

#AI #IA #ADS #ADV #Marketing #Advertising #PMI #SMEs #SMBs #TV #AddressableTV #LocalMarketing #Territory #Personalization #MediaPlanning #Strategy #Innovation #DataDriven #Precision #Mediaset #AdManager

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

Local radio generates behavioral data most operators ignore. Timestamps, listening habits, session duration, territorial patterns. Audio streaming platforms like Spotify and Pandora in the US prove the value of this data. SMBs should start leveraging it as territorial intelligence.

#AI #IA #ADS #ADV #Marketing #Advertising #PMI #SMEs #SMBs #Radio #LocalMarketing #Data #Behavioral #Territory #Audience #Targeting #Insight #Strategy #FirstParty

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

@innoscoutpro Exactly. And the repricing won’t be gradual. Once one client sees a 10-minute probe match a 10-hour red team, every proposal in the pipeline gets renegotiated. Speed doesn’t just improve the service, it resets buyer expectations overnight.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

@levie The gap isn't prompting skill, it's context packaging. A Fortune 500 can afford to build the perfect brief for an agent. A local business owner needs the agent to already know what questions to ask. That's where the real product challenge lives.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

@garrytan Agent skills are the new APIs. The companies that make it dead simple for AI agents to use their product will own the next distribution layer. @supabase just made the smartest GTM move of the quarter.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

@garrytan The rug only works if small businesses stay locked out. The real fight isn't awareness, it's making sure enterprise AI tooling reaches the 90% of companies that still can't afford it. Productivity gains that only reach the top aren't gains, they're leverage.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

@sahill_og Because the liability math on generated images is still a minefield, and @AnthropicAI entire brand is built on being the "responsible" AI company. Shipping image gen before the legal framework settles would undercut their only real differentiator.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

@haider1 The myth vs reality gap is the story of every AI cycle. But speed changes the category. Finding bugs isn't new. Finding them in minutes instead of weeks turns security from a cost center into a competitive edge. That's not hype, that's unit economics.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

@garrytan Open access isn't just ideology, it's infrastructure. The moment builders can't trust platform stability, they start hedging. And hedging slows down the entire ecosystem, not just one app.

[Fabio Ferrara @fabfer]

@BradGroux @steipete @AnthropicAI That's the point. Your highest-spending users are your best evangelists. Losing one publicly costs more than whatever policy they violated. The math doesn't work.