By Gregor Chalmers Head of Broadcast
It’s autumn of 2010 and I am in the early days of my career in media. I have been gainfully employed for a couple of months as a TV buyer, a job I struggled (and to a degree still struggle) to explain to my parents back home. I’d spend Monday to Thursday lunchtime “at the coalface” of TV buying. Next to my landline was a contact sheet of all the numbers I’d need for my equivalents at ITV, C4, Sky and more, the days spent calling up to build relationships, make small talk and negotiate for better airtime for my clients. When not on the phone I’d be updating schedules and frontsheets, ensuring my campaigns were delivered and paced properly through the month.
Media being what it was back then, once 1pm on Thursday came around I’d hope to get lucky and be called up last-minute to a lunch but failing that, a couple of beers in the King and Queen would suffice. This may or may not lead onto further socialising into the evening but come Friday morning it would be time to get the next week’s spot times sent to clients before the weekend.
I loved my formative months in media, and I still love it fifteen years later. I also love TV planning and buying which is why I’ve stayed a specialist in that area throughout my career. Looking back through my rose-tinted glasses, what often strikes me is how the job I started doing fifteen years ago has gotten both easier and harder for those just starting out. Yes, easier AND harder: do not abandon reading for fear of this becoming another “back in my day…” rant.
Let’s start with the harder. “TV” is a much more complex marketplace than it was when I started buying it. The linear marketplace has consolidated to fewer sales houses, but the streaming and VOD market has exploded and fragmented. BVOD was still in its early years in 2010 and was yet to be commonplace on plans whereas now it’s on the majority. CTV and streaming represent a huge growth opportunity for the market but that has meant TV buyers now need to be much more informed across a range of options. It’s no longer good enough to know if Hollyoaks or Emmerdale is a better fit for your brand, you need to fully understand the nuances between a multitude of different ways your target audience could be engaging with the TV screen.
With that expansion, the thorny issue of measurement has gotten every harder. This is an industry-wide challenge and while it’s encouraging to see more collaboration and progression in this space it’s far harder in 2025 to have unified TV measurement that it has ever been. Countless studies have proven the effectiveness of TV advertising but isolating exactly what part of your buy is working the hardest is a big challenge for the TV buyer of today.
With increased automation and more sophisticated tools at our disposal, you could argue that the TV buyer’s job has become easier — but I’d say it’s simply become better. Yes, the market is more complex, but that complexity should be a welcome challenge for any TV practitioner worth their salt. There is an abundance of suppliers to choose from when pulling together a TV plan: frankly you have no excuse not to deliver a TV execution that is going to deliver an uplift for your clients. There is a wonderful quote from Thinkbox a few years ago: “TV isn’t dead, it’s just having babies.” Those babies have started to grow up and in 2025 I’ve never been more excited to be a TV specialist.
But to make the most of this wonderful new market we must adapt our ways of working. No longer can the TV specialist get by simply by having the biggest calculator in the room (but yes, I still have the calculator given to me on my first day). That’s why we built KiteConnect, an end-to-end planning, buying and measurement solution that is fit for 2025 and beyond.
KiteConnect houses a suite of proprietary tools and a planning framework grounded in real campaign data and tangible results. It gives us a truly independent, agnostic view of today’s TV landscape — from cover curves across every premium video platform to channel- and programme-level audience response. We know that TV serves different roles at different times, from driving immediate action to shifting long-term brand metrics. That’s why we’ve built dynamic planning tools that optimise against multiple KPIs, showing exactly how different budget allocations can impact performance.
All of this means we can make informed decisions on where to best deploy budgets: we don’t need to trust our guts (reliable as they are) on whether a client should be spending 10% or 15% on BVOD, or whether now is the right time for them to test that new CTV proposition. We can run the numbers and show the evidence, always ensuring that we’re using the tools in conjunction with the most valuable weapon in our armoury: our people’s unrivalled experience and knowledge. Combing our tech with our amazing people has helped us expand our TV plans into the CTV and streaming worlds with confidence, delivering material business uplifts for our clients and ensuring they can capitalise on the amazing benefits the TV screen can provide.
As we enter the second half of the decade, I believe we’re about to enter a golden era of TV planning, an era where the capabilities of targeting and measurement will dovetail with the established effectiveness of the channel. I’m proud to have assembled a team of specialists dedicated to the art of TV planning and with KiteConnect we have given them the tools to supercharge performance for their clients in the months and years to come.
To find out more about how KiteConnect can support your business, please contact Emily.Underhill@thekitefactorymedia.com