TV wants small brands. Small brands aren’t convinced. Here’s what needs to change
Opinion – The Future of TV: Global Series
D19’s MD outlines the challenges for SMEs looking to get onto TV. He shares practical advice on testing, and what more the TV industry can do to serve the ‘FELT’ market.
The industry has noticed FELT brands.
The ‘fat end of the long tail’ covers challenger brands, regional advertisers and direct-to-consumer businesses for whom a £500,000 TV test isn’t a tactical experiment but an existential bet.
They represent a genuine growth opportunity for a medium that needs new money. Match funding schemes, bundled measurement offers, and new advertiser grants. The welcome mat is out. So why isn’t the door open?
What TV actually offers
TV remains the most efficient mass-reach medium available to a brand in the UK. We know this. It builds mental availability at scale in a way no other channel replicates. Profit Ability 2 demonstrates that it delivers the strongest long-term profit return of any medium. For a brand with genuine mass-market ambition, there is still nothing quite like it.
But knowing TV can do these things is not the same as knowing what it will do for your brand, within your budget, in your category, and tested in the way you can test it. That gap is where FELT brands get into trouble.
Start with the hypothesis, not the channel
Before a FELT brand spends a penny, there is a bigger question to answer: what are you actually trying to test? At D19, it is the first question we ask any client curious about TV, and in our view, the most important one.
There are two main hypotheses brands may consider. The first is a mass-reach question: does broad reach linear TV build mental availability and long-term growth in the Byron Sharp sense? The second is a video-on-the-biggest-screen question: Does a high-quality video asset delivered via VOD or YouTube drive incremental response?
The first tests what TV can uniquely do at scale. The second test video creative in a premium environment.
Both are legitimate, but they require different channel choices, planning approaches and measurement frameworks. Small brands can conflate them because the sales conversation rarely forces the distinction.
This is where agencies earn their money.
The first conversation we have with any client is not about formats or pricing. It is about what they are trying to prove and whether their budget, data infrastructure and appetite for patience match that hypothesis.
Getting a FELT brand onto TV without that conversation is a fast route to a failed test and a budget that never comes back. The brief to the broadcaster should follow from the hypothesis, not precede it.
Evidence base leaves smaller brands out
Profit Ability 2 is the strongest recent evidence base available: a meta-analysis of econometric models from 141 brands. But by definition, the brands most likely to need reassurance are the least likely to have econometrics in place or appear in the dataset.
Lantern, the cross-broadcaster initiative from ITV, Sky, Channel 4 and Thinkbox, should help over time. But it is still in beta and skews towards brands with existing data infrastructure.
If the industry is serious about FELT brands, they need to be in the dataset from day one.
Funding schemes can test the wrong thing
Broadcaster match-funding schemes lower the financial barrier. But they can come with exclusivity, inventory constraints and broadcaster-specific parameters that pull the test in the wrong direction. Testing one broadcaster in isolation is not the same as testing TV.
If a FELT brand runs a funded test on one broadcaster and sees modest results, what have they learned? That TV does not work for them? Or that one broadcaster’s inventory does not?
From an agency perspective, this is an uncomfortable position: we can help a client design the right hypothesis, only to see the funding structure undermine it. Cross-media-owner funding is what is needed, and that requires collaboration; individual broadcasters will not self-organise.
Infrastructure not built for this audience
Regional linear campaigns are logical and affordable but imperfect.
ITV’s regional structure was designed around transmission towers, not advertiser testing. Synthetic controls help, but require data science resources that most small brands cannot afford. Digital TV environments can offer cleaner signals at lower budgets, but are not the right test for a mass-reach brand-building hypothesis.
Too many measurement tools get sold as complete pictures when they are only fragments. Clients deserve transparency about what each can and cannot tell them.
A measurement suite with multiple routes and experimentation is almost always the right answer.
And for brands testing long-term brand effects, patience is required, as short-term direct-response timescales do not allow it. Judging brand investment that way kills budgets before they have had time to work.
How to attract more FELTs
Broadcasters need to be clearer about what their individual environments can and cannot do. That is not planning, it is honesty about channel role.
Selling TV as a single undifferentiated product to a FELT brand serves nobody.
Research bodies need to make FELT brands a deliberate part of their evidence-gathering from the start, not an afterthought once methodology has been built around established spenders.
The harder question is who advocates for these brands.
ISBA does important work across the industry, but its membership skews toward larger advertisers. There is no formal body whose mandate is to specifically represent FELT brands, which means nobody is systematically pushing for the cross-media owner funding structures or planning infrastructure that a first-time TV buyer actually needs.
The opportunity is genuinely there. Bringing more FELT brands to TV requires clearer evidence, better-designed tests and someone willing to take ownership of the gap.
That is a job for the whole industry.
David Lucy is the managing director of December19 (D19)