When I was growing up we had four channels. Some of my friends had Sky, but we weren’t posh enough for that, so if it wasn’t on one of the four, we didn’t see it. And if you were going to be out when your favourite programme was on, you had to programme the video recorder, get the timer right, check there was a blank tape in it and hope nobody recorded over it afterwards.
Eight-year-old me would have had his mind blown by the idea that one day I’d be able to pull a phone out of my pocket and watch television wherever and whenever I liked, and yet that’s where we are. The way people watch has changed the way businesses can advertise, mostly for the better, and 2027 looks set to bring more change still, particularly in who sells the airtime. So this is how it all fits together as the new year approaches, with the things that are settled kept apart from the things we’re only expecting.
Traditional TV is still here
The oldest part of the picture hasn’t gone anywhere. Millions of people still sit down in the evening and watch programmes as they’re broadcast, on channels like ITV, Channel 4 and Sky, and the big dramas, live sport, the soaps and the Saturday night shows still bring huge audiences together at the same time. That audience is drifting down slowly, as you’d expect, but it’s still most of the country. Ofcom’s 2026 report on the nation’s viewing found that 70% of people watched the traditional broadcasters’ programmes in an average week in 2025, whether live, recorded or on demand, compared with 78% in 2022.
For most businesses, ITV is bought by region, so a business in the North East can advertise to the North East. For a lot of regional businesses that’s still the best place to begin, and we’ve written a guide to advertising on ITV in your region. Around the main channels, meanwhile, four has turned into hundreds, with channels for sport, food, history, home improvement, classic comedy and more or less any interest you can think of. That’s useful for an advertiser, because the channel itself tells you something about who’s watching, and if you sell garden buildings, a channel full of property and gardening programmes isn’t a bad place to be.
Choosing which homes see your advert
The change that has opened television up to smaller businesses is that an advert no longer has to go to everybody who’s watching. With AdSmart from Sky, different households watching the same programme can be shown different adverts, and you choose who sees yours by things like where they live, right down to postcode level, along with age, whether there are children in the house, income band and more. It works in homes with Sky and Virgin Media, and you’ll hear it called addressable TV. A local business can appear on well-known channels in only the areas it serves, and a specialist one can pick out the kind of households most likely to buy. We’ve written more about how AdSmart from Sky works and who it suits.
The broadcasters’ streaming services have grown up as well. When they started, catch-up TV was something you watched hunched over a desktop computer, and now it’s built into smart TVs and set-top boxes, so most people watch ITVX or Channel 4’s streaming service on the main television in the living room, exactly as they would a live channel. Because viewers sign in, adverts can be aimed at particular audiences, which depending on the service can mean by age group, by interests, by the type of programme being watched and by location. Your advert appears in proper programmes from broadcasters people trust, but it’s shown to the people you’re trying to reach.
Those two worlds have started to merge, too. In May 2026 ITV began a trial of targeted adverts on its live channels, so the old division between live TV that everybody sees and streaming that can be aimed is getting harder to draw.
Netflix, Prime Video and YouTube
Not long ago, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video were the places people went to get away from adverts. Both now carry them, both are watched overwhelmingly on TV sets, and the audiences are large ones. Barb, the body that measures TV viewing in the UK, reported that in the first three months of 2026 Prime Video with adverts was in 12 million UK homes and Netflix’s plan with adverts was in 7.2 million. YouTube has travelled the other way, from something you watched on a laptop to one of the most watched things on the television.
That means a TV advert can now run in all three, on the big screen, with the sound on, in front of people who’ve chosen to sit down and watch something. We’ve written more about advertising on Netflix and advertising on Amazon Prime Video if you’d like the detail. A streaming service can only show your advert in the homes that have it, and in Netflix’s case only in those on the plan with adverts, so for most businesses these are an addition to the broadcasters’ channels and not a replacement for them.
One advert, lots of screens
People watch on phones, tablets and laptops as well as on the television, and they watch on demand as often as they watch live. What makes that manageable for an advertiser is that one well-made advert can follow them across all of it, so the same thirty seconds can run on ITV in the evening, on ITVX the next morning and on YouTube at the weekend.
It does mean the advert has to be made with all of those places in mind. Subtitles are a good example, because Channel 4 has required them on every advert since 1 March 2026 and ITV has said it will do the same by January 2027. We’ve written separately about subtitles on TV adverts, and requirements like that are something we plan for while the advert is being made, so that it’s ready for wherever the airtime is booked.
What’s changing in 2027
Some of next year’s changes are already settled. Channel 4 has announced that its sales team will take over the selling of 5’s airtime from 2027, which brings two broadcasters with very different audiences into one conversation. Barb has also said that Prime Video is due to be added during 2027 to the system the industry uses to check what a finished campaign delivered. It’ll be the first streaming service to be included, and it should make it easier to set what a campaign achieved on Prime Video beside what it achieved on ITV or Channel 4.
The biggest change is still waiting for approval. In July 2026 Sky agreed to buy ITV’s media and entertainment business, which includes the channels and ITVX, and the sale is expected to be completed in the second half of 2027 if the regulators allow it. When we last checked, in October 2026, the Competition and Markets Authority had opened its case but hadn’t yet begun its formal investigation, so nothing about it is certain. Our own expectation, and it’s only an expectation, is that the deal would eventually bring AdSmart’s household targeting to ITV’s programmes, which would matter a great deal to regional businesses. We’ve set out what’s known about the Sky and ITV deal, and what isn’t, in a separate article.
None of this is a reason to hold a campaign back. The changes are mostly about who sells the airtime and how precisely it can be aimed, and an advert that’s made and cleared today can run wherever that airtime ends up being sold.
So where do you start?
Viewers have more choice than they’ve ever had, and advertisers have more ways of reaching them than they’ve ever had, which is brilliant but can feel like a lot to take in. You don’t need to understand every platform, though, because what you need is a clear idea of who your customers are and what you want them to do, a great advert, and somebody who knows how to put it in front of the right people. We make the advert, and our media buying partners work out where it should go, so get in touch and we’ll talk you through the options.
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