Small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) will soon gain simplified access to premium television advertising. Sky, Channel 4, and ITV have partnered to create a new ad buying marketplace, launching in 2026, designed to make it easier for businesses new to TV advertising to reach large audiences.
This innovative platform, powered by Comcast’s Universal Ads platform and FreeWheel’s technology, will allow SMEs to purchase addressable inventory and run single campaigns across all three broadcasters. The marketplace will offer biddable pricing and a range of tools to help businesses manage and optimize their campaigns. This simplifies the process for businesses accustomed to digital and social media advertising, providing access to the scale and quality of television audiences.
The collaboration aims to streamline access to addressable TV inventory, which has traditionally been complex for smaller businesses. Further, the broadcasters are also exploring ways to make purchasing easier for established media agencies, potentially through a joint solution based on ITV’s Planet V technology.
Priya Dogra, Chief Advertising, Group Data and New Revenue Officer, Sky, stated: “In today’s fast-evolving media landscape, we strongly believe success will require collaboration, simplification, and innovation. Building on this innovation, we also want to simplify TV trading for established brands and agencies and look forward to exploring potential opportunities with ITV and Channel 4 to use Planet V.”
Kelly Williams, Managing Director, Commercial, ITV added: “As a TV industry, it is important that we collaborate to make television easy to plan, buy and measure for our established customers as well as the huge potential of new to TV brands. Both of these initiatives, this new marketplace for SME’s and Planet V for agencies, represent a very exciting future.”
The marketplace will offer features such as the ability to buy, measure, and report on a single campaign across all three sales houses, along with analytics tools to help brands optimize their advertising performance.