Universal Ads goes live in UK, providing TV with ‘easy button’
From today, SME advertisers in the UK can buy streaming TV audiences from ITV, Sky and Channel 4 through the same self-service advertising platform, allowing these broadcasters to compete harder for budget that has historically gone to global tech platforms like Meta and Google.
The Universal Ads platform – harnessing Comcast Advertising technology with some customisation for the UK – is designed to make TV as easy to buy as social.
The platform is also used to create and measure the TV campaigns.
David Shaw, head of global expansion at Universal Ads, shares a story of how one pre-launch test user – the owner of a three-site gym business in London- used his mobile phone to set up a campaign and go live in three minutes.
“That is the epitome of what we are trying to achieve – it sums up our mission statement,” Shaw declares.
All buying is programmatic, and there is no minimum spend for SME businesses using the platform, who can pay using a credit card.
The inventory pool includes the BVOD services ITVX and Channel 4 (whose broadcast channel and streaming service share the same brand), as well as Sky’s NOW subscription streaming service.
Other Sky digital inventory across its set-top boxes (including Sky Stream) and its Sky Glass Smart TVs is included.
Universal Ads becomes the first place anyone can buy ITVX audiences programmatically outside of Planet V – the broadcaster’s owned-and-operated planning, buying and selling platform (albeit limited to SMEs).
Universal Ads is a notable broadcaster collaboration, described by the companies involved as a ‘groundbreaking move’ for the UK advertising industry.
This is also an important step in the hoped-for international expansion of Universal Ads, which has been live in the US for over a year (and today offers inventory from 20+ TV providers).
New-to-TV advertisers
The UK broadcasters hope Universal Ads will attract new-to-TV advertisers including digital-native and direct-to-consumer brands who previously thought TV advertising was out of reach.
Likely advertisers include those characterised as growth-focused brands looking to ‘scale beyond social’.
The UK version of Universal Ads was first unveiled at last year’s Cannes Lions, and its stakeholders are using this year’s festival to hail the live deployment.
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“This will help SMEs reach millions of viewers while simplifying the buying process and improving efficiency, they told the world.
Rak Patel, chief commercial officer at Channel 4, believes lowering the barriers to premium media can be a game-changer for smaller brands.
“Greater collaboration across broadcasters can simplify TV buys, attract new categories and brands into TV, and help ensure premium TV remains innovative and competitive alongside global social and digital platforms,” he says.
Kelly Williams, managing director, commercial, at ITV, claims the Universal Ads initiative “proves that trusted, premium TV environments deliver real value for small-to-medium advertisers.”
Karen Eccles, managing director at Sky Media, adds: “The quality and impact of broadcast TV is now truly accessible to everyone.”
The Universal Ads buyside user interface is designed to feel familiar to anyone who has bought from social platforms.
Advertisers choose their budget (daily and lifetime), CPM bid level, campaign length and targeting parameters, and the system gives directional guidance on how likely they are to meet their reach objectives.
Buyers can select a genre – such as entertainment, factual, or sport – and use geographic and behavioural targeting.
You do not choose broadcasters. All buys are cross-broadcaster, but the sales houses compete on price and target audience availability.
No broadcaster knows the prices offered by their peers.
Buyers can implement Universal Ads pixels to track post-advertising exposure on their website, enabling attribution of business outcomes to TV advertising.
If they use Shopify, for example, they download the Universal Ads pixel app from the Shopify marketplace to install the necessary website code.
There is an option for manual installation, where the buyer can select events they want to measure, such as ‘purchase’, ‘add to cart’, ‘search’, or ‘start checkout’.
Clearcast creative approvals
Ads are automatically referred to Clearcast – the organisation that ensures ads appearing on UK television meet advertising standards codes (so they do not mislead, cause harm or offend) and which includes human oversight for all ad copy.
Once approved, the Clearcast clock number is entered next to the campaign name. Approved ad copy is uploaded from Universal Ads for playout.
Clearcast is funded by ITV, Sky and Channel 4, although it clears ads for a swathe of UK channel owners.
Shaw says Universal Ads is working closely with Clearcast to ensure copy approval does not become a bottleneck if, as expected, there is a proliferation of advertisers on TV with new creatives.
The broadcasters are already working with creative partners to produce ads for brands (including reformatting from social assets). These partners understand Clearcast approval requirements, so their systems already act as an early feedback and pre-approval validation layer.
This will help minimise the work for Clearcast’s human overseers.
Meanwhile, Universal Ads is collaborating with Clearcast to see how the approval workflow can be streamlined at a technical level.
To ensure smooth take-off, Universal Ads has opened to an initial base of advertisers. The advertiser pool will be broadened in the months ahead.
The Universal Ads platform also integrates with third-party measurement partners. One of those is Lantern, the measurement and reporting solution that will demonstrate online responses and actions generated by TV advertising.
This is another UK collaboration between Channel 4, ITV and Sky, powered by Thinkbox, and is due to go live next year.
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Shaw has worked previously at Twitter and TikTok, where his focus was to expand their advertising businesses beyond Top 250 enterprise brands to a broader group of largely performance-focused advertisers.
“This mirrors what we are trying to do with Universal Ads,” he notes. “We want to change the perception that for those advertisers, TV is inaccessible and expensive.”
Sky, Channel 4, ITV and Universal Ads are convinced the small-medium business market will respond to the promise of frictionless buying married to the brand safety and proven effectiveness of TV.
“We are preserving everything that makes broadcaster TV trusted, effective and impactful,” Shaw promises.
Universal Ads is part of Comcast Advertising but operates under its own brand.
The media owners using Universal Ads in the US (to open the TV market to smaller advertisers) include NBCUniversal, Paramount, Fox, Scripps, AMC Networks, Roku, Vizio, Samsung, DirecTV, Cox, Xumo and Vevo.
Comcast Advertising’s president James Rooke is a long-time champion of the need for TV to develop an ‘easy button’ – removing buying hurdles to compete harder with social and search.
Universal Ads is a practical example of that vision.