Seven channels, scored 85 down to 40.
- channels, one audience definition
- 7
- highest published fidelity, on CTV
- 85
- lowest, on Cinema, published in the same type
- 40
- scores that never move, however good the brief is
- 4 of 7
Ordered by the best score each channel can reach
The solid bar is the floor: what the channel scores when nothing in your brief helps it. The faded extension is what a brief carrying intent, interests or a matching segment adds on top. Where there is no extension, the score is a constant.
CTV & streaming TV
person-levelThe one channel where a job title survives the translation almost intact.
£140 / week plan floor · 4 named rails · 3 targeting inputs
85 at best, 60 at the floor · 3 discrete bands
Paid search
content-levelOne search plan. Two execution rails. Neither of them writes your keywords for you.
£100 plan floor · 2 named rails · 3 targeting inputs
82 at best, 45 at the floor · 3 discrete bands
Podcast & digital audio
content-levelYou are not buying a person here. You are buying what they listen to.
£250 plan floor · 5 named rails · 4 targeting inputs
fixed at 65 — one band, whatever the brief carries
Paid social
content-levelVendor-neutral until the moment of execution, then exactly as native as it needs to be.
£250 plan floor · 2 named rails · 3 targeting inputs
62 at best, 38 at the floor · 3 discrete bands
Addressable & linear TV
household-levelThe fastest-growing channel on this list, and the one that needs the most paperwork.
£1,000 plan floor · 3 named rails · 4 targeting inputs
fixed at 55 — one band, whatever the brief carries
Digital out-of-home
geo-cohort-levelA billboard cannot know who you are. It can know who walks past it.
£100, enforced plan floor · 3 named rails · 4 targeting inputs
fixed at 50 — one band, whatever the brief carries
Cinema
venue-levelThe lowest fidelity score on the site.
£500 / week plan floor · 2 named rails · 4 targeting inputs
fixed at 40 — one band, whatever the brief carries
Bars are drawn against a fixed 0–100 scale, so the seven are comparable by eye. The lowest published band is 38, on Paid social: neither interests nor demographics. The geography penalty below can take any channel lower still, to a floor of 10.
A fidelity score is not a quality score
A fidelity score is not a quality score, not a forecast and not a model output. It is a published, deterministic grade of how closely a channel can express an audience at all. A person grade means the vocabulary can carry a person-level claim; household, content, geo-cohort and venue each degrade one step further from the individual. Four of the seven are fixed constants — audio is always 65, addressable TV always 55, DOOH always 50, cinema always 40, however well your brief matched — because those vocabularies cannot express more than that. Three vary, across three discrete values each: CTV at 85, 65 or 60 depending on marketplace match strength, search at 82, 68 or 45 depending on whether you supplied intent, and social at 62, 48 or 38 depending on whether you supplied interests. One further rule applies everywhere: naming a city the UK geography table does not map costs 15 points on every channel, and the rationale names the city.
person
1 band · 85household
3 bands · 65 to 55content
7 bands · 82 to 38geo-cohort
1 band · 50venue
1 band · 40Grade and score are two axes rather than one. The content grade alone runs from 82 down to 38, because a search plan built from buyer-authored intent and a social plan built from a city name are both content projections and are not remotely the same buy.
The number that costs a sale on the day
Every media platform can list its channels. What almost none of them will tell you is how much of your audience definition survives the trip into each one, because the answer is often "not much" and saying so costs a sale on the day. Publishing the number buys back more than it costs: if you have been told that a billboard can target IT decision makers you already know it is not true, and the vendor who says so first is the one they believe about the rest of the plan.
The lowest fidelity score on the site.
The practical consequence is on every plan rather than on this page. A compiled channel plan carries its score and the compiler's own rationale for it, so the argument about whether a 55 is worth £1,000 happens before the money moves rather than in the reporting call afterwards. Where the compiler cannot find what your brief asked for, it says so and grades the plan down instead of quietly substituting something broader.
Bring a brief you expect to score badly and we will compile it live in the session rather than describe it.
Talk it throughOne sentence. Seven compiled plans, and seven scores.
Forty-five minutes. Bring an audience you actually want to reach and we compile it live across all seven channels, including the ones that score badly for it.
Book a working sessionDesign-partner phase · the sandbox needs no card and no credentials · nothing here sells self-serve media
The smallest line each channel will accept
Our own floors, enforced when the plan is built rather than advised in a footnote. Vendor-side minimums are a separate thing and bite later, at activation.
Enforced at plan generation: an under-floor line is dropped and its budget redistributed with an explicit note, and a manual plan is rejected against the same numbers. Vendor-side minimums are separate and bite later — Sky AdSmart's £3,000 burst is the one most likely to surprise a first plan.
Where the targeting data comes from, across all seven
Every compiled channel plan carries a lawful-basis manifest: the provider of each segment, the basis it relies on, and the warnings raised while compiling it. These are the 25 targeting inputs published across the seven channel pages, split by the basis the manifest records for each.
Consent-chained
A provider asserts a consent chain behind the segment. The manifest records which provider asserted it, which is not the same as AdBuyMCP having verified every link in it.
Legitimate interest
Household attributes and content allowlists the manifest records as relying on legitimate interest rather than on a consent chain.
Outside UK GDPR scope
Aggregate or buyer-authored inputs with no personal data in them: cinema audience packs, OpenOOH venue types, postcode polygons, your own search terms.
The manifest is a record of what the compiler acted on, not a legal opinion and not a substitute for your own assessment. Its value is that the answer to “where did this audience come from?” is a document attached to the plan rather than a conversation weeks later.
Questions about the seven
The ones asked most often before a first plan is built.
Do I have to buy all seven channels?
No, and at most budgets you should not. A broad seven-channel plan at £2,000 a month is operationally and statistically weak, and spreading a small budget across every channel is the fastest way to make none of them measurable. Two or three channels with enough weight to prove something is the shape that works. The plan generator funds the lines the budget can actually carry rather than putting a token line on every channel.
What is a lawful-basis manifest?
A record, attached to every compiled channel plan, of which data made that targeting lawful: the provider of each segment, the basis it relies on — consent-chained, legitimate interest, or outside scope entirely — and the warnings raised while compiling it. It exists so that the answer to "where did this audience come from?" is a document rather than a conversation, and so that a DPO reviewing a campaign is reading the same record the compiler acted on.
Who decides which segments get used — the AI or a lookup table?
The table. The language model extracts semantics from your brief: what kind of person, what interests, what geography, what intent. Deterministic registry code then matches those semantics against catalogue keywords and emits known segment identifiers. The model never freehands a vendor id, which is why a compiled plan can be audited line by line and why a hallucinated segment cannot reach a buy.
Are these the complete segment catalogues?
No. The examples shown on each channel page are drawn from the sandbox-scale slices we ship with, which are real taxonomies at reduced size — the AdSmart attribute catalogue, the Vistar and Bombora taxonomies, an IAB Audience Taxonomy 1.1 slice, DCM packs, Acorn and Mosaic tables. The full exports load into the same shapes, so catalogue size changes neither the compiler behaviour nor the fidelity grade. No catalogue here has yet been loaded for a live campaign, because none has run.