ITV launches planning tool for SMEs to forecast outcomes
ITV has launched a planning tool aimed at allowing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to forecast short-term outcomes based on their TV investment.
Announced at ITV’s 13th annual Showcase event in Manchester on Thursday, the Outcomes Planner is the latest effort by the public-service broadcaster to entice new-to-TV advertisers in the long tail to spend on the channel.
“Our Outcomes Planner lets every advertiser — even those who’ve never been on TV — benefit from all the experiments we’ve run on its business impact over the past few years,” said ITV measurement innovation lead Sameer Modha. He told The Media Leader that the tool provides “realistic scenarios of how TV can help any specific business, large or small”.
The Outcomes Planner uses data from 750 outcomes studies, including from ViewersLogic, to predict impact on metrics such as web traffic. Marketers can plan for different scenarios depending on budget size, brand size campaign length and seasonality.
It is free for any business to access. Caroline Clear, ITV’s client strategy controller, said it has been designed to be “super easy to use” so that marketers of all sizes can make campaign predictions with relative ease.
“We wanted to reflect back the fact that £50,000 of spend with us is just as valuable as £5m,” Clear said.
The move follows commercial managing director Kelly Williams’ indication that broadcasters were increasingly eyeing brands in the “fat end of the long tail” as a way to expand the TV ad revenue pie and compete more directly with platforms for ad investment.
At the Showcase event, Williams declared: “We’re giving television the measurement it deserves.”
There were 3.5m advertisers in the UK last year, by Williams’ count, and ITV worked with just 8,500 — a number it is intent on growing. “The long tail that everyone talks about is bloody long. It’s gigantic,” Williams said at the Advertising Association’s LEAD event earlier this year.
Apart from the Outcomes Planner, ITV has also toyed with using generative AI to reduce the cost of producing creative for TV ads for SMEs.
Meanwhile, Modha has been co-leading the development of Lantern, a collaborative effort alongside Sky and Channel 4 to measure the short-term impact of TV advertising on sales. Whereas the Outcomes Planner is predictive, Lantern would provide post-campaign insights via a panel.
Lantern expects to launch a request for proposal in the autumn, ahead of a full launch in 2026.
How Lantern will bring outcome measurement to TV — with Sameer Modha and Matt Hill
Innovations for YouTube and interactivity
In addition to the Outcomes Planner, ITV announced two other commercial innovations on Thursday: Lead Gen Ads and YouTube Affinities.
Lead Gen Ads are a new interactive format aimed at enabling brands to capture interest and qualified leads directly from TV ads on streaming platform ITVX.
Viewers will now be able to choose to convey their interest in a given spot via their remote. Doing so consents ITV to share user details with the advertiser via a screen pre-populated with the consumer’s email address (provided at the point of ITVX account registration).
The format has been designed to be “seamless, quick and [with] barely any interruption”, according to ITV AdLabs advanced advertising manager Nadine Warren.
Meanwhile, YouTube Affinities is a targeting opportunity for brands advertising against ITV’s content on the video-sharing platform.
The format seeks to leverage Google’s audience and search data behind ITV’s YouTube channels to better enable brands to target audiences based on their interests.
ITV expanded its efforts on YouTube in December 2024, when it began publishing full episodes to the platform.
According to Abul Noor, ITV’s head of YouTube sales, the distribution strategy has netted the broadcaster 2-4% incremental audience reach without cannibalising its existing audience.
This article has been updated since publication to include further details from ITV Showcase.