We make TV adverts, so you’d expect us to say TV is the answer to everything, and it isn’t. We’re obviously not neutral on the subject, but radio and outdoor are both very good at certain things, there are times when one of them is the better place to start, and a campaign that uses more than one will often do better than any of them would alone.
A useful way to compare them is by the frame of mind each one finds people in. TV reaches them when they’ve sat down to watch something, radio when they’re busy with something else, and outdoor when they’re on their way somewhere, and most of what each is good and bad at follows from that.
What TV is good at
TV is the only one of the three that can show something happening and make people feel something about it. It has moving pictures, sound and half a minute of somebody’s attention on the biggest screen in the house, which makes it the strongest of the three at explaining what a business does and at giving people a sense of what you’d be like to deal with.
Being on television also makes a company look established, and we’ve written about why TV is the most trusted place to advertise. Because people often watch with their families, it’s well suited to anything that’s decided jointly too, such as a family holiday or a choice of college.
Against that, a TV advert costs more to make than a radio advert or an outdoor campaign, and it takes longer to get on air, because there’s an idea to develop, a production to plan and Clearcast approval to obtain along the way. One old objection has largely gone, though. TV used to mean paying for a whole region whether you served all of it or not, and these days the airtime can be bought for a chosen set of postcode areas.
What radio is good at, and when it’s the better choice
Radio’s audience is bigger than people tend to assume in an age of podcasts and playlists. RAJAR, the body that measures radio listening, found that 51.1 million adults, or 87% of the adult population, listened to the radio each week in the second quarter of 2026.
Its great strength for an advertiser is repetition. Airtime costs less than it does on TV, so the same budget buys many more plays, and hearing something again and again is how a name or a phone number lodges in somebody’s memory. Radio also keeps people company in the kitchen, in the car and at work, so it can catch them close to the moment they buy. It’s quick, too, because a radio advert can be written, recorded and on air in a fraction of the time a TV advert takes, and local stations have loyal listeners and a strong sense of place.
That combination makes radio the better choice in a few situations. If your message is simple and the main thing is that people hear it often, radio will usually do that for less. If you’ve got news at short notice, such as a sale this weekend or an event a fortnight away, radio can be on air while a TV advert would still be at the storyboard stage. And if your customers spend their working day with the radio on, as a lot of tradespeople and drivers do, it reaches them at a time when television can’t.
What radio can’t do is show anything, so it’s a harder job if your product needs to be seen, or if your name or web address is awkward to say out loud. It’s also mostly heard in the background, by people whose attention is on something else, which is why it leans so heavily on repetition, and why a radio advert needs a good idea every bit as much as a TV advert does.
What outdoor is good at, and when it’s the better choice
Outdoor, or out-of-home, is any advertising people see when they’re out and about, and it’s much more than posters. It takes in roadside billboards, bus shelters, the sides of buses and taxis, railway stations, shopping centres and, increasingly, digital screens. Outsmart, the trade body for the outdoor industry, reported that digital accounted for 68% of outdoor advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2026, and a screen can do things that paper never could, such as showing a breakfast offer in the morning and a different message on the way home.
Outdoor’s first strength is location, because you can be on the road to your showroom, at the station your customers pass through every day, or in the shopping centre where they spend their Saturdays. Its second is that nobody can turn it off, skip it or scroll past it, and somebody who commutes past the same site sees it twice a day for as long as you’re there.
That makes outdoor the better choice when a business depends on a place. A visitor attraction, a retail park, a car dealership on a main road or a new shop that people need to find will often get more from being seen on the way there than from anything else.
Its limit is time, because people pass an outdoor advert in seconds, so it can only carry one thought, made up of a name, an image and a few words. That makes it very good at reminding people of something they already know, and much less good at explaining anything new.
They work better together
It’s rarely a straight choice between the three, because each one makes the others work harder. Somebody who’s seen your advert on TV already knows who you are when they hear you on the radio, and the billboard or bus they pass on the way to work reminds them of both. By the time they need what you sell, they’ve come across you in three different places, and you feel like a familiar name.
We’ve seen that happen with our own clients. The advert we made for Windows Plus Roofs, with the agency WriteSound, was fronted by a well-known North East actor, and before long he could be seen all over the North East, on billboards, vans, leaflets and the signage at their stores. The animated characters we created for AirFair were reused in their online and outdoor advertising, which meant the campaign looked the same wherever people came across it. And when we made a national TV advert for PC Specialist with their agency, Forward & Thinking, the campaign also ran on TalkSport radio, and we made the radio advert too.
It only works if the campaign looks and sounds like one thing, with the same idea, the same line, the same voice and the same music running through all of it. That’s one of the reasons a piece of music written for your brand can be so valuable, because it carries from the TV advert to the radio advert without any effort.
How to choose where to start
Take a family-run carpet and flooring warehouse on a trading estate, where most of the customers come from the towns within half an hour’s drive. If people in those towns don’t yet know what makes it different from the national chains, TV is the place to explain it, bought for its own area and not for the whole region. If the news is a sale over the bank holiday, radio will get the message out quickly and often. And if thousands of people drive past the estate every day without turning in, a site on the approach road may be the best money the business spends.
If the budget stretches to more than one of the three, TV usually does the explaining and the others do the reminding. It’s generally better to do one of them properly than all three thinly, though, because a campaign that’s too light to be noticed anywhere is the most expensive kind there is.
Comparing the three on paper is harder than it looks, because each is measured by a different body (Barb for TV, RAJAR for radio and Route for outdoor) and they’re counting different things, so the audience figures can’t simply be set side by side. Our media buying partners can help you work out the right mix for your budget.
Where we come in
TV is what we do best, but we don’t stop there. We write and produce radio adverts too, and the footage from a TV shoot can be turned into social media adverts and a version for cinema. It’s much easier to plan for those at the start than to add them afterwards, and it means the whole campaign belongs together.
If you’re weighing up where to begin, get in touch and tell us what you’re trying to achieve. We’ll give you an honest view, and that includes telling you if we don’t think TV is the right place for you to start.