What is Univeral Ads?
In A Nutshell:
Universal Ads is a new self-service TV advertising platform recently launched in the UK, allowing advertisers to buy streaming TV campaigns across ITV, Sky and Channel 4 from a single interface. Designed to make TV buying as straightforward as social media advertising, it enables campaigns to be planned, launched and measured in minutes, with no minimum spend and payment by credit card.
Why Does It Exist?
As viewing continues to shift to streaming services, broadcasters are looking switch ad spend over to streaming services too. They see this as an opportunity to automate ad sales in similar way to the self-serve platform available to advertisers and brands on social channels. Using such a platform means that much of complexity previously surrounding TV buys has been removed, hopefully opening up the medium to new advertisers.
Is It Any Good?
Time will tell! It’s early days for the platform, but the idea of access all the buying options across a wide range of channels in one place is compelling. Brands, especially clients buying direct beware – the CpMs are likely to be high, at least initially. At the time of writing we don’t know how much inventory will be made available via this platform vs. via Planet V or the media owners directly.
Do You Still Need An Agency?
Well, we would say this, but yes! The simple reason is that every media buy must be considered in the context of whole market availability in order to objectively appraise what the right option is for each brief. If you ‘don’t know what you don’t know’, poor buying decisions could be made. We have the ability and the systems to look at the incremental benefit of every option and assess it’s relevance in the context of each one’s price.