UK TV trio challenge Meta and Google with new pitch to digital advertisers

Around £30bn of the £45bn spent on UK advertising currently goes into the voracious paws of big tech: chiefly Meta (Facebook, Instagram and about-to-take-advertising What’s App) and Google (the gatekeeper of nearly everything digital and owner of YouTube.)

Sky, ITV and Channel 4 have rather belatedly woken up to this threat and are pooling their streaming offers to try to attract the small and medium-sized companies that make up the majority of Meta’s market, not necessarily Google’s.

AI is driving the change, in particular Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg who is promising a cradle-to-grave ad service next year that provides creative, production, media placement and measurement (if you believe it.) The argument so far is that this will bring more small advertisers into the market rather than affecting the big brand business that drives most agencies, or so straight-faced Meta executives would have you believe.

“This is a fightback,” one TV advertising executive told the Guardian. “Facebook and YouTube have done really well in allowing anyone with a credit card to book an ad campaign, they created the long tail of advertising, TV has never really played in that market before.”

The ultimate justification for advertising is that it stimulates competition, giving newbies and smaller businesses the ability to challenge the establishment. So the move by ITV, Sky and C4 is good for advertising as a whole, provided they deliver.

One challenge will be creative – most the ads on the UK’s cheap channels are absolutely awful, the prospect of more of these makes your heart sink. Media buying could do with a kick up the arse too: this Revolut Business ad isn’t badly made but it appears in every single (over-long) ad break everywhere to the extent that you really begin to hate Revolut Business.