For a long time, the smallest area you could buy on television was a whole ITV region. That’s fine if you serve the North East or Yorkshire, but it’s a lot of people to pay for if your customers all live within ten miles of your showroom. It’s now possible to show a TV advert only to the households in the areas you choose, on the same channels the national brands use, and that has opened television up to businesses that would never have considered it before. It also hands you a decision that regional advertisers never had to make, which is where exactly to draw the line around your customers.
How it works
The trade calls it addressable TV, meaning that the advert is sent to chosen households and not to everybody watching the channel. Two neighbours can be watching the same programme on the same channel, and when the break comes, one of them sees a national car brand and the other sees you.
The best-known version is AdSmart from Sky, which works through Sky and Virgin Media boxes, and we’ve explained how it does it in AdSmart from Sky: what it is and who it suits. The broadcasters’ streaming services, such as ITVX and Channel 4’s, can do the same thing, because viewers give their postcode when they sign up, and ITV has been trialling targeted advertising on its live channels since May 2026 as well.
None of them reaches every home on its own. Thinkbox, the marketing body for commercial TV, puts AdSmart’s reach at about 40% of the UK, because it depends on a household having Sky or Virgin Media, and the streaming services add the homes where somebody watches ITVX or Channel 4’s service, whatever kind of box they have. That’s why a local campaign often uses more than one of them, so that the same streets are reached from more than one direction.
Deciding where to draw the line
You can describe your area far more precisely than a region allows, because it’s built up from postcodes. That might be a list of the postcodes you already serve, or the ones within a set distance of your shop or showroom, or the ones people can reach you from in, say, twenty or thirty minutes’ drive. Of the three, drive time usually gives the truest picture of a catchment, because a circle on a map takes no notice of rivers, hills or the way the roads run, and a town ten miles away down a dual carriageway is closer in practice than a village five miles off across the moors. The line can be drawn finely, too, because Thinkbox says that on AdSmart the targeting goes down to postcode sector level, which means the first half of a postcode and the first digit of the second, so roughly a neighbourhood or a handful of villages.
The best guide to where the line should go is your own order book. Take a fitted bedroom company with a showroom in Preston. If it plotted where its last few hundred customers live, it would be unlikely to see a neat circle, because they’d run out along the main roads, thin out towards the town where a competitor has a showroom, and cluster on the newer estates where people are still fitting out their homes. A map like that is a much better starting point than a guess, and it gives whoever plans the airtime something real to work from.
It’s usually best to draw the line a little wider than that map suggests. Your existing customers show you where you’re already known, and the reason for advertising is to reach the people who haven’t heard of you yet, including the ones slightly further out who’d happily make the trip if they had. If you target too tightly, you only ever speak to the people who look like your customers today, and miss the ones who might become customers tomorrow, which is a point we’ve gone into in is TV advertising wasteful?
The same caution applies to the other choices on offer. On top of location, you can usually narrow things further by the kind of household, such as families with children or people in a certain age group, and we’ve covered what’s available in TV advertising in 2027. For most local businesses, though, the map has already done most of the choosing. There’s a practical floor as well, because only some of the homes in any area can be reached, and a very small patch may not contain enough of them to make a campaign worthwhile. Our media buying partners can tell you how many households your area holds before you commit to anything.
Different adverts for different places
Once the area is settled, it opens up something a regional campaign can’t do. Because the advert is delivered household by household, it doesn’t have to be the same one everywhere, so a business with several branches can run a version for each, with the right address and the right local offer on the end. It’s still one production, with a few alternative endings.
That’s something we plan for when we’re making the advert, because shooting it so that the ending can be swapped is easy to do on the day and much harder to add afterwards. Each version is then cleared and delivered as an advert in its own right, which we look after along with everything else.
What does it cost?
You’re only paying for the households that see your advert, so the budgets are a fraction of what a regional campaign would cost. The price for each household reached is higher than it would be on ordinary TV, because you’re paying for the precision, but you’re buying far fewer of them, and none of them are wasted on people who live too far away to use you.
It also tends to be more flexible, because campaigns can often be set up at shorter notice than traditional airtime, and you can start small and build up. Our media buying partners can tell you what the current minimums are.
What it’s like once it’s running
A campaign bought this way behaves differently from one bought by region, and it’s better to know that before the first week’s figures come in. On a regional campaign, everybody watching sees the advert at the same moment, so there’s often a visible jump in website visits a few minutes later. An addressable advert reaches each household whenever that household happens to be watching, so the response is spread across the days and weeks, and it shows up as a gradual rise in enquiries from the area with no single moment you could point to. That’s a difference in how the advert is delivered and says nothing about how well it’s working.
You do get one thing a regional advertiser doesn’t, which is a ready-made comparison. The postcodes you left out carried on as normal, so the gap between the two is a useful guide to what the advertising did, and it’s one of the ways of measuring a campaign we’ve written about. It’s also quite normal never to see your own advert at home, if you happen to live outside the area you chose.
Who is it good for?
It’s a natural fit for any business that draws its customers from a local area, and we’ve written separately about several of them.
- Car dealerships and garages
- Home improvement companies and showrooms
- Solicitors, dentists and other local professionals
- Restaurants, attractions and venues
- Retailers with one shop or a handful of branches
- Colleges and training providers
Postcodes or the whole region?
Precision isn’t everything, and for some of those businesses the region is still the better buy. If people right across it could become customers, ordinary regional airtime will usually reach more of them for the money, and everybody sees you at the same moment, which is part of what makes a business feel established. We’ve covered that route in how to advertise on ITV in your region. For many local businesses the answer is a mixture, with addressable TV covering the area you serve and something broader behind it when the budget allows.
If you’d like to know what a local campaign could look like for your business, get in touch and we’ll talk it through. It helps if you can tell us roughly where your customers come from, because that’s where the planning starts. If you’re based in our part of the world, there’s also a piece on TV advertising in the North East.