Let’s be honest: for most of our industry’s history, the idea that ‘TV just works’ has been taken for granted.
When I joined ITV seven years ago, the concept of ‘outcomes’ wasn’t even part of our commercial vocabulary. It certainly wasn’t part of our culture because, frankly, we didn’t need to sell ourselves in a performance-led way or prove what works with rigour.
But changing culture means more than building a range of tools or being able to provide return-path data like the big tech platforms.
I see it like this: we now take less for granted. This means being more customer-focused, more attuned to how our clients plan and more thoughtful about how we support them. It also means we need to be more generous with what we know, whether it’s making data more readily available, publishing code on GitHub to encourage experimentation or commissioning cultural insight projects we can share with the industry.
ITV benefits the more we provide: the more we learn, the more we share, the better able we are to make advertising more effective and the more confident and capable our clients become.
That mindset shift – from guarding value to giving it away – is largely thanks to smaller advertisers that challenge us to be more open and helpful by default. They may be called small businesses, but their impact on commercial TV has been huge.
Challenger brands drive innovation
TV was traditionally optimised for national campaigns with deep budgets and a long-term brand-building focus. It wasn’t designed with the requirements of smaller, agile, fast-growth brands in mind.
As these challengers began to enter the market, they brought different expectations. They wanted flexibility, accountability and evidence that investment in TV could deliver clear results. Supporting those needs required us to think differently and change how we worked.
We developed tools in direct response to these conversations. One forecasts the incremental impact of a TV campaign even in the absence of first-party data or advanced analytics infrastructure, something that is specifically built with early-stage businesses in mind, not an fmcg giant.
We tried to answer the questions that came up over and over in conversations with brands at different stages of growth. And this process keeps going as the needs of challenger brands change. So, in many ways, the businesses driving ITV’s product innovation today are those just beginning their TV journey, not the ones with the most cash.
Small business, big impact
Historically, the mechanics of TV meant it was hard to serve smaller brands well. We couldn’t meet their needs at scale and, for a good while, it felt like an unsolvable challenge.
Many of these businesses operate with lean teams, evolving plans and fast feedback loops, which means they need media strategies that are flexible, focused and easy to act on. Supporting them effectively required a different approach, so we focused on incentives and tools that addressed affordability, accessibility and accountability.
As an industry, collaboration has become a defining characteristic of how we expand access to premium video. Last year, ITV, Channel 4, Sky and Comcast Advertising announced their intent to launch a joint self-service advertising marketplace for SMEs – a major step in offering small brands a seamless way to run unified campaigns across all three broadcasters. We’re also working with Sky, Channel 4 and Thinkbox on measurement tools that will reveal the ‘performance power’ of TV advertising.
Together, these initiatives represent a shift in mindset. Rather than expecting small advertisers to navigate legacy systems, we’re meeting them where they are with transparent tools, accessible support and a clearer pathway into television.
Kate Waters is director of client strategy at ITV
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