Don’t let your London flatmate decide the media plan
Opinion
ITV set out to explore how young people really watch TV. What we uncovered about TV’s cultural role in the UK was even more surprising.
Ask a junior planner how many of their friends watch live TV and you’ll likely get a blank stare.
Ask the same person how often they really sit down to watch TV with others (outside a major sports match or Love Island final) and the answer will probably still be “rarely”.
That’s the bubble talking.
When we began work on What Unites Generations, ITV’s new research into how people connect across age groups, I expected it would confirm what I’d quietly come to believe: that my own habits — having Loose Women in the background while I work or being one of the millions of people who remain loyal to Corrie — were a bit of a throwback.
But it turns out I’m not the outlier. My media friends are.
Coming from someone who wrote their university dissertation on The Only Way is Essex, let’s just say this came as quite the shock…
It’s not ignorance — it’s proximity bias
It’s not that media planners are misinformed. If anything, they’re over-informed.
Faced with a confusing jumble of different sources of “media truth”, we become even more prone to biases.
Anyone working in a fast-paced, urbanised industry is vulnerable to proximity bias — the tendency to see your own behaviour as the norm.
If you live in London, stream everything and get your news from Instagram Stories, it’s easy to assume everyone else does the same. When that happens, TV can seem like an afterthought, especially when you’re planning campaigns for younger audiences.
It’s our job to take these into account when making good decisions for our clients.
And the research says otherwise. TV isn’t something young people have grown out of. It’s something many still grow up with.
Working with Crowd DNA, we surveyed over 1,500 people aged 18-78. Conveniently for us, it revealed that TV remains a powerful shared experience, not just for older audiences but for younger ones too.
But it confirmed something else really important.
Young viewers aren’t disengaged — they’re different
Take one 17-year-old we met during the ethnographic stage of our research.
She watches Coronation Street, Emmerdale and EastEnders every night with her mum and brother. They even save episodes to watch together over dinner. It’s not second-screening; it’s a ritual.
That kind of behaviour is more common than many might think. These viewing rituals aren’t the kind of thing people post about or that planners are likely to see reflected in their own feeds. So the idea that Gen Z have rejected TV wholesale just doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
Our research also challenged a few sacred cows about what younger audiences want.
Media narratives often portray Gen Z as socially conscious, politically engaged and obsessed with purpose. But in our nationally representative survey, Gen Z were the generation most likely to say “freedom of expression has gone too far” and the least likely to agree that “everyone should be free to be their true selves”. They also expressed the highest level of financial anxiety.
That doesn’t mean they’re apathetic. It means they’re pragmatic.
When it comes to TV, they’re simply consuming it on their terms, in ways that often go unnoticed by media professionals who assume digital is the default.
TV as a bridge, not a battleground
Despite the generational hype, What Unites Generations showed us that people agree far more than they disagree.
This is part of an annual series that digs into different aspects of viewers’ lives (fans, young adults, generations, voters). We’ll report back on our latest findings at an online summit on 11 July.
Across age groups, people told us they share common concerns (such as the cost of living) and want to learn from each other: 75% of respondents said they wanted more knowledge from older generations and 63% said they wanted to learn from younger people.
TV is one of the few media spaces where that exchange happens organically. Shows like Getting Filthy Rich attract older viewers not because they relate, but because they want to understand.
From quiz shows to family dramas, TV offers shared reference points that digital platforms struggle to replicate. It’s not just a medium; it’s a mirror.
Audiences are still real people
From where I sit, we’re not just in the TV business.
The depth and breadth of our audience means we’re also in the culture insights business. These insights are playing a big role in ITV’s strategy across airtime, ITVX and licensing, both nationally and regionally.
Indeed, we’re finding that TV is still the connective tissue between generations. It still sparks conversations at the dinner table. It still shows up in the group chat. And it still delivers reach, emotional impact and cultural salience in a way few other channels can.
Before this project, I sometimes felt out of step with the media world I worked in. I love TV. I believe in its power. But I assumed that made me an anomaly.
The truth? The anomaly is the industry bubble that stopped paying attention to the sofa.
Audiences are wider, more varied and more united than we think.
Lucy Irving is senior cultural strategist at ITV