Sky has agreed to buy ITV’s television business in a deal worth up to £1.6 billion. It’s the biggest change to commercial television in this country for a long time, and if you advertise on ITV, or you’re thinking about it, you’ll want to know what it means. Nothing changes for the time being, because the sale has to get past the regulators first. In the meantime, we’ve set out what has been agreed, where the review has got to and what we think is likely to follow, which matters most if yours is a regional business.
What’s been announced
According to ITV’s own report, Sky is buying ITV’s channels and its streaming service, ITVX. The price is made up of £1.2 billion for the broadcasting business, a swap in which ITV takes on Sky’s production company Love Productions, and a further payment of up to £200 million that depends on how ITV’s advertising sales perform.
ITV Studios, which makes programmes for ITV and for other broadcasters around the world, isn’t part of the sale. It’ll carry on as a separate company and has a long-term agreement to keep supplying programmes, and Sky’s chief executive has said that ITV will remain a public service broadcaster. What’s changing hands, in other words, is the part of ITV that advertisers deal with, which is the channels, ITVX and the airtime that’s sold around the programmes.
It isn’t a done deal
The sale still needs approval from the regulators, and it isn’t expected to be completed until the second half of 2027. Until then ITV and Sky remain separate businesses, and ITV airtime is bought and sold in exactly the way it is today, so if you’ve got a campaign booked, or you’re planning one for the next year or so, there’s nothing you need to do differently.
The review has started to move since we first published this article in July. The Competition and Markets Authority opened its case on 23 July 2026 and invited comments from anybody with an interest until 6 August, although when we last updated this article, in October 2026, it hadn’t yet begun its formal investigation. ISBA, the body that represents British advertisers, sent in its members’ views and said that advertisers want to understand what the deal will mean for pricing, transparency and independent measurement, among other things. ISBA also expects the Culture Secretary to decide later this year whether to call for a wider review on public interest grounds, and says the process could run well into 2027.
The competition question is largely a question about advertising, because the deal would bring two of the biggest sellers of TV airtime under one owner. City AM has reported that Sky and ITV are expected to argue they should be judged against the whole advertising market, including the online platforms they now compete with for budgets, and not against television alone. How the regulators see that will go a long way towards deciding whether the sale goes through as it stands or with conditions attached.
What it could mean for advertisers
Nothing has been announced about how advertising will work once the two are under one roof, so what follows is our view and not something Sky or ITV have said.
Our own expectation is that AdSmart will become available on ITV. Sky has spent years building AdSmart, which lets different households watching the same programme see different adverts, chosen by things like postcode, and ITV has the biggest audiences in commercial television, so it’s hard to imagine Sky not wanting to bring the two together. There’s a practical reason to expect it as well, which is that AdSmart works through Sky and Virgin Media boxes, and a great many homes already watch ITV through one of those. ITV’s channels aren’t part of AdSmart at the moment, because ITV and Sky have been rivals for the same advertising budgets, and ITV has been developing targeting of its own (in May 2026 it began a trial of targeted adverts on its live channels with a group of advertisers). Under one owner there’d be far less reason to keep the two apart.
We’re not alone in expecting it, because Digiday’s report in the days after the announcement, which drew on an analyst at Gartner, said marketers could expect to use AdSmart’s targeting across ITV’s audiences. If that’s how it turns out, you may eventually be able to advertise in ITV’s biggest programmes to only the households you want to reach.
For a regional business that would be a significant change. At the moment, for most businesses, advertising on ITV’s main channel means buying a whole region, as we’ve explained in how to advertise on ITV in your region. Say you run a car dealership that draws its customers from one city and the towns around it. Putting your advert in the break in the middle of ITV’s biggest drama means paying for everybody in the region who’s watching, most of whom live too far away to buy a car from you, and for a lot of businesses that sum has never quite added up. Being able to go smaller than that in the same programmes, and pay only for the households close enough to visit your forecourt, could bring ITV within reach of businesses that have never been able to justify it.
It may also become simpler to buy ITV and Sky together, with one conversation and one plan covering both. Sky already sells the airtime for a long list of channels besides its own, so adding ITV’s would follow a pattern it knows well. If your airtime is handled by a media buyer, they already hold both of those conversations for you, so you’d be likely to notice that change less than the targeting.
What we don’t know
There’s a lot still to be settled. We don’t know whether the regulators will attach conditions, what will happen to the way airtime is priced, or how long any of the changes will take once the deal has gone through.
Pricing is one of the first questions advertisers have raised, and there’s a precedent for the regulators stepping in on it. When Carlton and Granada were cleared to merge in 2003, creating the ITV we have today, it was on condition that the two companies gave undertakings about how they’d sell their airtime, and those undertakings were still in force in 2022, when ITV needed the CMA’s consent to change part of the way it priced its airtime. Nobody can say whether something similar will be asked for this time, but it does show that advertisers’ interests have carried weight before.
Timing is the other unknown, because even if the sale is approved without a hitch, joining up two sales teams and two sets of technology isn’t done overnight. It’s quite possible that very little looks different to advertisers for some time afterwards.
Our advice for now
Our advice is to carry on as you are, because ITV is still the most effective way to reach a large audience in your region, and that isn’t affected by who owns it. We wouldn’t hold a campaign back to wait for any of this, since the sale isn’t expected to complete before the second half of 2027, and everything we’ve described beyond that is expectation and not a promise from anybody.
If advertising to a smaller area than a region is what you need now, that’s already possible on Sky’s channels and on the broadcasters’ streaming services. The advert itself will serve you whichever way things go, because one that’s been made and cleared for ITV can run on AdSmart as well.
We’ll update this article when there’s something definite to report. In the meantime, if you’d like to talk about advertising on ITV or Sky, get in touch, or have a look at how media buying works.
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