TV advertising in the UK is accessible to businesses spending from around £3,000 per campaign on regional digital channels. The process involves four steps: defining your audience, choosing between linear and connected TV (CTV/BVOD), producing a compliant 10–30 second spot, and booking airtime through an agency or directly with a broadcaster.
Most businesses thinking about TV advertising for the first time make the same mistake: they imagine it as one big decision. Either you’re “in TV” with a six-figure national campaign, or you’re not in TV at all.
That’s not how it works anymore — and it’s not how we recommend starting.
At VCM, we treat the move into broadcast as a sequence, not a leap. Each stage is designed to test the channel cost-effectively before committing real budget to the next one. Here’s how that sequence works, what it costs at each stage, and why most brands should never go anywhere near a national linear TV buy as their first step.
Why Businesses Start Looking at TV in the First Place
There are usually three triggers that bring a business to the TV conversation:
- Brand awareness — you need to be seen and recognised beyond your existing customer base.
- Diminishing returns elsewhere — your search and social campaigns are well optimised but growth has plateaued, and you need a new channel to reignite it.
- Proven direct response — your online performance marketing already works, and you want to test whether the same direct response logic holds up on a bigger screen.
Whatever the motivation, the principle stays the same: extending into broadcast channels can get expensive fast, so we advocate a clear test-and-learn approach. Scale the budget only once there’s clear evidence it’s moving the needle for the business — not before.
The Four-Step Path Into TV
We map the move into TV across four steps. Targeting broadens and potential reach increases at each stage — and so, generally, does the cost of entry.
Step 1: SEO / PPC. If you’re reading this, you’re probably already here. This is the foundation — managing the full buying process across search to make sure the basics are working before any video spend gets layered on top.
Step 2: Online display and paid social. Targeted, low-wastage, low-cost, with limited reach. This is the natural next step for refining audience targeting before you start paying for the bigger formats.
Step 3: Connected TV (CTV). This includes BVOD (broadcaster video on demand), AVOD (advertiser video on demand) and YouTube. Think of this as an extension of your existing online campaign — similar targeting logic, similar audience-buying tools — but with the added benefit of broadcast-quality advertising. This is genuinely the easiest, lowest-risk entry point into “TV” for most brands, and it’s where we’d recommend almost everyone starts.
Step 4: Linear / live TV. Once you’ve proven the concept on CTV, the lower-cost linear options — regional ITV, a select channel mix, a limited daypart — let you test traditional broadcast without committing to a full national campaign. Worth bearing in mind when you pick a flight date: TV viewing patterns shift with the weather, so late spring and early autumn often deliver steadier delivery than a heatwave week.
The reality is messier than a four-step diagram suggests; in practice, most campaigns sit across more than one of these stages at once. But as a framework for deciding where to put your first pound, it holds up well.
Why CTV Is the Smart Starting Point
TV viewing has changed dramatically over the past decade, and that shift is exactly what makes CTV the right entry point now. It’s no coincidence CTV is where we point most first-time TV advertisers — connected TV is one of the fastest-growing formats in UK media right now, and we break down why in our 2026 UK media forecast.
Viewers are migrating from live, linear TV to streaming on demand, and that migration has fragmented the market in five distinct ways: fragmentation of audiences, of supply, of platforms, of data, and of measurement. For an advertiser, that fragmentation is actually good news, because it’s created genuinely addressable opportunities that didn’t exist before.
With traditional linear TV, every household watching the same programme sees the same ad. With addressable TV, households watching identical content can be served completely different ads, based on demographics, purchasing habits, search behaviour, income level, even postcode sector. That’s a meaningfully different targeting proposition to the TV advertising of even five years ago.
There are now seven scaled sales points for TV-set quality inventory in the UK — but for a first campaign, we’d always recommend focusing on a handful of the larger platforms: Sky AdSmart, ITVX, 4OD and Amazon Prime. Each has a different core viewer profile:
- The premium AVOD platforms (Prime, Netflix) and Sky’s addressable solution tend to skew towards a younger, more affluent audience.
- ITVX typically has an older viewer profile.
- YouTube is usually the cheapest buying option of the group.
Our advice for a first campaign is to pick a single platform rather than spreading budget thinly across several. Concentrating spend gives you better negotiation leverage and a cleaner read on what’s actually working — which matters when you’re trying to learn quickly.
Is It Actually Measurable? Yes — That’s the Whole Point
This is the part that surprises most first-time TV advertisers: addressable TV is now genuinely accountable. You can measure the same kind of outcomes you’d expect from digital — increased site traffic, conversion events, return on investment — not just abstract “reach.”
A properly built campaign typically reports on:
- Standard metrics — weekly and end-of-campaign reporting on impressions, reach and frequency, view-through rate and similar core numbers.
- Brand awareness lift — comparing survey results between exposed and non-exposed households across up to seven brand and ad-related measures.
- Creative and audience optimisation — QR codes embedded directly in the creative to track and refine performance.
- Conversion tracking — a pixel on your website tied to the campaign, tracking discrete events like homepage visits or shopping basket activity.
- Search uplift — pre- and post-campaign search analysis, including share of search against competitors.
If a media partner can’t speak to most of these, it’s worth asking why.
What Does a First Test Actually Cost?
This is where the numbers tend to surprise people in a good way.
Regional ITV. ITV1 is still sold regionally rather than nationally, and remains the largest commercial TV channel in the UK — it can reach substantial audiences from a single spot. A heavyweight brand awareness test is achievable in a smaller region for as little as £50,000, and a direct response test for as little as £25,000. ITV is currently incentivising new-to-TV advertisers with strong deals, particularly for direct response brands — so the timing is favourable.
.National DRTV. Direct response TV campaigns use a fixed cost-per-thousand to access lower-cost airtime that runs throughout the day. This is often the natural first step into linear TV for advertisers who’ve been running performance marketing online and care most about attribution. Using industry measurement software, it’s possible to evaluate whether TV is genuinely cost-effective at driving traffic, conversions and sales — a one-month test typically runs from £25,000.
How the Process Actually Works
In practice, the process breaks into two phases:
Planning. You give us the usual brief — budget indication, core targets, regional requirements. We translate that into a buying audience using demographic, geodemographic or geographical data, or your own first-party data. From there, we identify the most relevant channels and platforms for the brief, refine that selection against your specific priorities, and advise on attribution software where it’s relevant.
Buying. This determines the CPM used across the full campaign. We report weekly on impressions and clicks, then provide a full report at the end of the campaign.
It’s a structured process precisely so that the “test” part of test-and-learn produces a clear, honest answer about whether TV works for your business — not just a vague sense that the campaign “went fine.”
Where to Start
If you’re already running search and social and starting to see returns flatten out, or you’ve simply never considered broadcast because the budgets always sounded out of reach, the honest answer is: start smaller and more measurably than you think.
CTV is the natural first move for almost every business making this transition. A regional ITV or DRTV test is the natural second move once you’ve proven the concept. Neither requires the kind of budget that’s kept TV advertising feeling off-limits for so long.
Get in touch with James Ferrin to talk through what a first TV test could look like for your business — no obligation, just an honest conversation about budget, audience and whether it makes sense for you right now.
James Ferrin
Managing Director, VCM Ltd
james@vcmweb.co.uk | 07932 945554