TV has a unique superpower: helping small and medium-sized businesses punch above their weight and reach audiences they'd never normally get in front of. B Corps have authentic stories worth shouting about, and Channel 4 loves nothing more than telling stories that spark change. There are incredible purpose-driven brands nationwide, and this opens the door for more of them to grow bigger.
Regardless of whether a media channel is addressable or not, it's still reaching strategic and high-value audiences. So, understanding how these different media buys interact with each other [helps buyers] make better investment decisions.
"Until maybe eight years ago, television in and of itself was a very clean and tidy well-lit marketplace. It was very clear and easy to understand this television universe. "What's happened is, with the rise of streaming, particularly through the pandemic, we're seeing streaming begin to rival and sometimes exceed linear viewership. "And that has created a massive amount of fragmentation for the television universe."
As he explained, programmatic standards like the OpenRTB protocol have enabled computer programs to buy ads on behalf of humans. But the ad formats and inventory types purchased by those programmatic tools have been pretty simplistic, relatively speaking. By that I mean when compared to the complexity of a traditional TV ad buy, where the audience has to be forecasted ahead of time and there are all kinds of rules regarding which advertiser gets what ad slot in which program.
And while some have been quick to declare the era of TV over, for the advertising industry this isn't the end of TV, rather an opportunity to bring together the benefits of TV and digital through programmatic technology. Programmatic gets a bad rep in the traditional TV stronghold of branding, but this is a chance to show programmatic can do more than just deliver performance metrics.
LightBoxTV is proud to announce a strategic integration with Outra, the UK's leading provider of predictive property and location data. The collaboration will empower TV advertisers with the ability to plan and optimise campaigns based on highly accurate geographic and life-stage insights - bringing a new dimension of localisation and relevance to TV targeting strategies. Outra's household-level data goes beyond typical postcodes, offering a clear view of where high-value customers live, their home ownership status, affluence levels, and future propensity to move or convert.
But let's drop the nostalgia and remember that this is a masterclass in what creativity really looks like across eras, categories and styles. Including what it looks like in the modern day. Yes, the tools have changed. The targeting is tighter. The media landscape's a multiverse now. But the principles that made Hovis timeless in 1973 still apply in 2025.
LightBoxTV and Starcount's partnership combines advanced audience insights with TV planning, ensuring emotionally relevant media strategies that align with consumer values.
