19 Oct 2026 | Catherine Offord

How to improve the balance between ROI and profit in AV planning

Opinion

Marketing is getting better at ROI and worse at growing profit. Bicycle Manchester’s founding partner asks, ‘Has AV planning become part of the problem?’

Here is a number that made us stop. Research by Les Binet and Will Davis for the IPA found that ROI across campaigns in its Databank rose 4% since the pandemic, while the net profit they generated fell 11%.

In other words, it is possible to get better at showing a return while making less money for the business.

That should bother all of us. We have more data, more dashboards and more ways to optimise than ever before. We can tell you what someone clicked and what they bought next. But can we say with the same confidence who would have bought anyway? Who are we failing to reach? Where will the next wave of customers come from?

No single channel is to blame for that gap. But we think the way many advertisers plan AV deserves a closer look.

What are we trying to achieve?

Ask whether TV or social delivers a better return and you can find research to back up either answer. It depends on the brands studied, the outcomes measured and how long you wait to see the results.

Even the labels are becoming less helpful. An ad watched on a television screen could have been bought through a broadcaster, a streaming service or YouTube. Saying “TV versus digital” does not tell us much about how an audience actually experiences the work.

The more useful question is what a particular brand needs to achieve and which environments can help it get there. That takes planning. You cannot answer it with an average ROI figure pulled from a slide.

Have we lost some of the specialist AV craft?

Agencies and marketing teams have spent the last decade building stronger performance capabilities. That has been a good thing. It has made media more accountable and helped growing businesses find customers in ways that were once out of reach.

But as budgets and attention shifted toward platforms that could deliver a fast return, something else happened. The specialist knowledge needed to plan and buy across linear TV, broadcaster video on demand and streaming became harder to find.

The job has also become more complicated. Audiences move between services and screens. Each environment is bought, priced, and reported differently. Yet the audience does not experience your campaign as a set of separate buying routes.

A plan can include every fashionable platform and still miss the basics. Who are we trying to reach that we do not reach today? How much duplication are we paying for? What job should the creative do in each place? What result would give us the confidence to invest more?

If nobody can answer those questions, you may have a list of channels. You do not yet have a plan.

There is no standard answer for a good video mix

Research published this September by ISBA and Ebiquity looked at more than £100m of UK TV investment across 13 brands. It found that Total TV generated 54% of the media-driven profit for those brands. That is a share of the profit measured in the study, not a recommendation to spend 54% of a budget on TV.

Within that TV mix, linear accounted for 57% of profit and other video formats accounted for 43%. Linear still has a significant role, but the rest of the viewing landscape matters too.

Those results come from 13 brands, each with its own audience, budget and objectives. A national brand trying to reach as many households as possible will have a different answer from a growing business testing a few regions.

For one, linear might be the most efficient way to build reach. Another option is a regional test using broadcaster streaming inventory.

The skill is in knowing the difference and being able to explain it. The business objective should lead to the channel choice.

Measurement needs to help you make the next decision

When media is bought in separate silos, it tends to be reported in separate silos too. Every platform can show what it delivered, and many will claim a result. Those reports have their uses. Add them together, though, and you still do not know how much new demand the whole plan created.

We are not suggesting every business needs a costly marketing mix model before it can run a video campaign. The measurement should fit the size of the decision.

A growing brand might start with a well-designed geographic test and a clear commercial measure of success. A bigger advertiser might use incrementality testing or marketing mix modelling to understand how its channels work together over time.

Whatever the approach, agree the questions at the start. What are we expecting to change? What are we comparing it with? How long will we give it? What result would make us scale the activity and what would make us change it?

If you only ask those questions afterwards, the channel with the tidiest report usually wins the argument. That may be the channel doing the best job of capturing demand that already exists, while the work needed to create future demand gets squeezed again.

Advertisers should be able to see the thinking behind the buy

Relationships with broadcasters and platforms matter. So do trading knowledge and the ability to negotiate well. They can make a real difference to what an advertiser gets for its money.

But a good price is only part of a good plan. Advertisers should be able to ask why a particular audience, broadcaster or platform was chosen. What else was considered? What is each part of the investment expected to do? How does it fit with the rest?

Those should be straightforward questions to answer. If the rationale starts and ends with the deal available, it is worth asking whether the plan is really built around the business.

Where does the next stage of growth come from?

Performance marketing has helped many businesses grow. We are not arguing for anyone to walk away from channels that work. But getting more efficient at capturing demand does not guarantee there will be enough new demand to capture next year.

We are not arguing that every brand needs to go back to the TV plan it had ten years ago either. Viewing has changed. The range of options has changed. The way we plan AV has to change with it.

Binet and Davis’s finding leaves marketers with a question worth taking into the next budget meeting: