LONDON, UK — It counts half the UK population as a registered user of its streaming platform. Now ITV wants other broadcasters to join the data party.
ITV recently relaunched its streaming platform as ITVX, a stronger offering with slicker UI and new-look linear channels. Meanwhile, Planet V, its system for agencies to buy ITVX inventory programmatically, has gained real traction and advanced digital targeting capabilities.
In this video interview at Beet.TV’s London summit in December, Rhys McLachlan, Director of Advanced Advertising, ITV, told me it is important ITV retains control over its viewer data – but he does hope other broadcasters can take advantage of Planet V.
Streaming sovereignty
Following a discussion on “data sovereignty” at “Looking Ahead: TV in Europe 2025”, a Beet.TV Leadership Summit, MacLachlan said he is bearish on broadcaster attempts to lean into programmatic that “have largely relied on the outsourcing of those solutions”.
The ISBA/PwC Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study of 2020 lives long in the memory, having found 49% of ad spend taken off in platform fees.
“We find that strategy very difficult to resolve with our revenue streams.,” MacLachlan told me. “We can’t sustain a model where we’re a subject to a 49 cent tax regime. So sovereignty over our sale, over our value chain, is critically important to the viability of ITV moving forward.
“And that’s what’s manifest in Planet V – a fully programmatic ecosystem. It enables the data layering, addressable planning function, and buying at the front end, integrated into ITVX, but whereby we contain and control the entirety of that value chain.
“Every cent spent by an advertiser in Planet V goes to media and goes to the delivery of that advertising asset on media.”
TV’s walled garden?
ITV’s Planet V capabilities includes demographic targeting, use of third-party marketer data, one-to-one matching through InfoSum’s clean room and more. Coupled with ITVX, it is set to drive UK targeted TV advertising at significant scale.
MacLachlan says ITV is “at the beginning of that journey” and is “constantly evaluating the veracity of that data” to build robust ad products.
Whilst the UK market is smaller than the US, buyers will want to avoid the fragmentation problems that have plagued peers across the Atlantic.
“We do acknowledge that there is fragmentation across the silos,” MacLachlan says. “It’s certainly our intent to collaborate with other broadcasters to bring those silos together.
“But we are unashamedly and quite publicly declaring that we are looking to build a walled garden of like-minded fellow broadcasters where we can collaborate, where we can mingle inventory, mingle IDs in a secure location where we’re all still maintaining sovereignty over our respective sales and our respective products…
“What we’re not looking to do is enable access to third parties to access our inventory and our data to create value off-platform. That’s that value retention, that value control, which is so critically important to us as a broadcaster.”
You’re watching “Looking Ahead: TV in Europe 2025” a Beet.TV Leadership Summit presented by Magnite & Publica, in partnership with egta. All videos were filmed on-site at our event at London’s Soho Hotel. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
