The Year Ahead 2025: TV takes more than three to tango… and a different tune
The Year Ahead 2025 | Opinion
We have a fax machine TV trading system in the AI age. But the need for structural change can only be addressed with the full participation of the agency community.
The Future of TV Advertising Global conference in December lived up to its reputation as one of the most insightful, but it’s a shame that so much great content is packaged up in a TV conference where most of the audience comprises broadcasters and other “insiders”.
A lot of the discourse is of wider importance. This especially refers to presentations by Adam Morgan and Peter Field, as well as Karen Nelson-Field and Vicky Fox — both of which dealt with much deeper aspects of overall media effectiveness worthy of a more diverse audience.
Such presentations tend to preach to the converted at this event and can be (and often are) dismissed as being TV fighting a rearguard defence.
Notwithstanding this, The Future of TV Advertising Global is not afraid of tackling industry debate and elicits the kind of candour that only very senior people are allowed to express publicly. It also brings to London a raft of presenters who serve to highlight how different the US is to Europe.
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TV is too time-consuming
A case in point was a presentation from Google on just how interruptive it plans to make advertising, continuing the traditional US tendency to try to catch people out. This is well-known to be a great way to make advertising unpopular on this side of the Atlantic.
Another was a presentation from James Rooke, president of Comcast Advertising, who reprised his call for traditional TV companies to make buying TV easier in order to emulate the big platforms’ self-service apps.
He spoke powerfully about how simple it is for buyers to place $20m of bookings on online platforms on a Friday. And that’s before lunch.
Spending money on TV in the conventional way is too time-consuming. Comcast announced its new, simpler booking platform this week.
It seems to imply that media planning doesn’t exist and media buyers are just given a bucket of money to spend, wherever it’s easiest.
But it is difficult to deny that it’s a lot easier to spend advertising money with the big platforms and now the streamers too.
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More than a trading issue
This became the dominant theme for the two days. But there wasn’t any real discussion on how this might be achieved and very little about the involvement of the people who buy airtime, not just sell it.
It is hard to talk about automation of TV trading without the participation of both the people who plan the buy and buy the plan.
This isn’t just a trading issue but one that affects everyone involved in cross-platform TV/video convergence. Intelligent planning across linear and streamed feeds is now one of the most important skills in our industry, given its scale and the difficulty of handling unconnected data, currencies and metrics.
Getting this right should, in time, help correct the dysfunctionality in trading.
No doubt ITV, Channel 4 and Sky will renew their efforts to agree on a joint sales platform that avoids allegations of collusion and gives each what they want-ish — eventually.
At least having only three main sales points makes consensus more likely.
The involvement of their main agency customers won’t be as straightforward, because there are more of them and they’re less inclined to play nicely with each other (although the eventual combination of Omnicom and Interpublic may change this).
Slow to innovate
In one session, Vicky Fox of Omnicom Media Group bravely pointed out deficiencies in how broadcast VOD is measured and reported, but even this was glossed over.
Generally, it is hard to get agency people to talk publicly about much these days and especially about trading matters. In fact, it seems they don’t want to talk privately either.
While the media agencies would be crucial participants in any move towards automated trading, they have also been slow to innovate.
The current system suits them well, given the efficiencies of the agency deal system and the control over airtime allocation they need to divvy up discount in order to reach the pitch guarantees that release performance-related fees by gaming the media audit process.
And now proprietary media (“principal-based” for our US cousins) makes their control of the process even more vital.
It’s an antiquated and inefficient process and agency appetite for change may be limited.
Gargantuan Excel worksheets with millions of colour-coded rows and hundreds of tabs versus the platforms’ tools? Not much of a contest.
Stuck in the past
It’s not too controversial to say that the TV planning and buying discipline in the UK is stuck in the 20th century. Yet it’s not just a tools issue.
First, the TV industry is still largely localised. The platforms can build once for everyone, while each country is different. There is no trading enterprise solution for the agency community internationally.
Secondly, online platforms don’t have to worry about copy clearance, robust research-based audience data, meaningful currencies, regulatory considerations, caps on minutage or ad break curation. Self-reporting is fine, thanks.
YouTube, in particular, has become a behemoth without such constraints and TV companies have found themselves forced to sup with the devil by making their content available on it.
Structural change is required to allow TV companies to compete without both arms tied behind their backs.
Not enough progress
This is highlighted in a recent report by Enders Analysis, commissioned by Isba.
The study describes the awkward interface between the legacy model of media trading and the combined traditional and digital transmission of content. There is progress in how this is handled through audience measurement techniques, but much less in how media trading should evolve.
It is a subject that the whole industry is grappling with and which doesn’t trouble the big platforms on their way to the bank.
One quote from Enders sums the situation up well: “While progress has been made, broadcasters’ ideal ecosystem of a fully converged linear/VOD market where deals and trading are done seamlessly across both has not yet been realised.”
We have a fax machine trading system in the AI age.
Uniquely among media, television is hamstrung by trading factors such as agency share deals that don’t take volume into account as much as they should and the whole imbroglio of Contract Rights Renewal and the antiquated (and ill-defined) Station Average Price basis for pricing.
The antediluvian emphasis on cost, not outcomes, is another factor highlighted by Enders.
Another choice quote emerged: “The agency remuneration model and pitches awarded on the basis of the largest TV discount can lead to opaque holding group business models. Value is extracted through ancillary services from a related group company and the sale of inventory media.”
The arrival of streaming has led to a revolution in people’s viewing habits, but the antiquated two-track system of TV/video trading and the lack of structural progress will continue to frustrate attempts to make execution simpler and faster.
Agency contribution
So, what’s the answer?
The Enders report sets out four recommendations for progress.
One suggests that advertiser-agency relationships should rebase to drive business outcomes. Given that the report was commissioned by Isba, it is de facto aiming to engineer this change; the agencies won’t do so by themselves. Procurement, please take note.
Through this report, Isba is urging action and TV companies themselves are working to adapt their sales approaches to respond to changing viewing habits and an outcomes-led approach to advertising sales.
But the conjoined need for structural change and new converged planning and buying techniques can only be addressed with the full participation of the agency community. This needs to be encouraged by advertisers themselves.
If agencies don’t really care about this subject because the money gets spent anyway somewhere else (and possibly with higher margins) and they retain control of how TV is traded, then little progress will be made.
Erosion of quality
Leadership from the agency community is vital and this can come from individual companies or collectively. Its absence sends out negative signals.
Returning to the Enders report, it states that advertisers would like the market to offer “high-quality programming, available on any device at any time”.
Amen to that. But without leadership and structural change, we will see continued erosion of quality as revenue continues to flow to platforms that have low or no content costs, or to streamers, which offer less localised content.
The other loss will be to the Exchequer, as adspend drifts even further to US-based corporations. Ofcom, please note.
It would be nice to think that in December 2025 we will be discussing all of this at The Future of TV Advertising Global, with active debate and contribution from the planners and buyers of TV and video.
It is, after all, what the conference is really all about.
Nick Manning is the co-founder of Manning Gottlieb Media (now MG OMD) and was chief strategy officer at Ebiquity for over a decade. He now owns a mentoring business, Encyclomedia, offering strategic advice to companies in the media and advertising industry, and is non-executive chair of Media Marketing Compliance. He writes for The Media Leader each month.