Addressable & linear TV
The fastest-growing channel on this list, and the one that needs the most paperwork.
Fixed at 55 out of 100
One band from the compiler, whatever audience detail the brief carries, because the vocabulary this channel compiles into cannot express more than this. Geography is the only thing that changes it, and it can only subtract: a city the UK table cannot map takes fifteen points off.
Household-level proxy: Experian Mosaic/CACI attribute combinations ∩ postcode districts. Strong geo precision; firmographics approximated by household affluence/occupation attributes.
Standard, and the only band. A television set does not know who is in front of it.
Naming a city the UK geography table cannot map costs 15 points here as it does everywhere else, and the rationale on the plan names the city rather than dropping it quietly. That penalty applies on top of the bands above.
What your audience actually becomes here
Each row is a table the compiler matches your persona against, with the provider behind it and the basis the lawful-basis manifest records. The language model extracts the semantics from your brief; these deterministic tables emit the identifiers, which is why a hallucinated segment cannot reach a buy.
Examples are drawn from the sandbox-scale slices of each taxonomy the platform ships with. The full exports load into the same shapes, so catalogue size does not change the compiler behaviour or the fidelity grade. Nothing here has yet run against a full production catalogue, because nothing has run live.
From one sentence to a Addressable TV targeting spec
The persona is matched against the AdSmart attribute catalogue and the top four attributes become the household selection. Cities resolve to their postcode districts and to their BARB macro region — London, Granada, Central, Yorkshire, West, STV — through an explicit geography table rather than a model's guess. Where the persona names a city with no UK mapping the score is penalised and the rationale names the city, so an unmapped geography is visible rather than silently dropped.
The model never emits a vendor segment id. It extracts semantics from your brief — what kind of person, what interests, what geography, what intent — and deterministic registry code matches those against catalogue keywords to produce known identifiers. That is what makes a compiled plan auditable line by line, and what stops a hallucinated segment reaching a buy.
The fastest way to see this is a real brief compiled live in the session rather than a worked example.
Talk it throughThe rails that reach this channel
3 of the 25 connectors the platform registers touch Addressable TV. Each one is graded on our own evidence ledger, which is deliberately blunt: a mocked HTTP test proves a client was written, not that a vendor accepted the request, spent money, or returned real delivery.
Comcast Universal AdsBuying API
StubA typed client stub for the Universal Ads Marketing API.
- What has to happen next
- Partner approval and a per-request RSA signing key, neither of which exists. Every live method fails closed. We do not buy ITV, Sky or Channel 4 inventory today, and this rail should not be read as implying otherwise.
- Getting access
- Developer registration is a form; the partner approval behind it is a commercial relationship, and we have not entered into one.
Sky MediaBooking workflow
Client builtSky AdSmart addressable TV, booked as a generated brief on household attribute combinations rather than bid on.
- What has to happen next
- Ingest and reconcile the first authoritative sales-house delivery statement.
ITVBooking workflow
Client builtITV Planet V booking paperwork.
- What has to happen next
- Ingest and reconcile the first authoritative sales-house delivery statement.
Named on this channel's compiled plans: Sky AdSmart — booking workflow · ITV Planet V — booking workflow · Comcast Universal Ads — typed stub, partner-gated, buys nothing today. Across all 25 connectors, spend-tested stands at 0 and report-verified at 0, and a continuous-integration check keeps those two counts honest.
The whole supply matrix →What Addressable TV will take
Formats and the limits the product enforces on this channel. Where a limit is a schema constraint, over-long copy fails at the edge rather than being silently truncated on the way to a provider.
TV script
Generated with Clearcast substantiation notes attached, because a claim you cannot substantiate is a clearance rejection rather than a copy problem.
Mezzanine
16:9 ProRes 422 HQ, 1920×1080, 25fps, ≥20Mbps, supers inside 90% title-safe, EBU R128.
Asset production is charged separately and never blended into the media fee. The creative studio, in full
What Addressable TV can prove, and what it cannot
Delivery comes from the sales house, through the reconcile step of the booking workflow rather than from an API — and no addressable-TV delivery statement has yet been ingested. Causation is possible in principle where a campaign is regional enough to leave a control group, which buying by postcode district and BARB region makes straightforward to arrange here. Household-keyed deduplication against CTV is designed and unit-tested but is exercised only by sandbox data today.
Provider delivery, observed response, modelled estimates and powered causal evidence stay visibly separate on the report rather than being averaged into one number, and the geo-lift engine returns an underpowered verdict instead of a lift figure when the spend cannot carry the test. The four verbs, in full
Your own site's analytics, read through your token, so brand response is measured on data you already own and can audit.
GA4 as an alternative brand-response source where that is what the advertiser already runs.
Brand-lift survey panels, intended for the fourth measurement verb.
What this will not pretend past.
Every one of the seven channel pages carries one of these, in the same type. The best this channel scores is 55, graded household-level, and the paragraph beside this is what that score does not cover.
Two things, and the second is the bigger one. Fifty-five out of a hundred is the whole story on targeting: you are buying households whose Mosaic profile over-indexes on the attribute you asked for, not the people you asked for. And we do not buy UK broadcast inventory today at all. Universal Ads — the one integration that would cover ITV, Sky and Channel 4 in a single partnership — is a typed stub whose every live method fails closed, blocked on partner approval and a per-request signing key that does not exist. Sky AdSmart and ITV Planet V generate booking paperwork rather than making the booking. No addressable-TV delivery has ever been reconciled here. Anyone offering you one-click addressable TV in the UK is describing something else.
If that limit is disqualifying for your budget, we would rather you heard it in the session than after the invoice.
Talk it throughThe same audience, compiled everywhere else
One audience definition, seven translations, seven published scores. A plan that funds two or three of these with enough weight to prove something beats one that puts a token line on all seven.
CTV & streaming TV
The one channel where a job title survives the translation almost intact.
3 bandsPaid search
One search plan. Two execution rails. Neither of them writes your keywords for you.
3 bandsPodcast & digital audio
You are not buying a person here. You are buying what they listen to.
fixed bandPaid social
Vendor-neutral until the moment of execution, then exactly as native as it needs to be.
3 bandsDigital out-of-home
A billboard cannot know who you are. It can know who walks past it.
fixed bandCinema
The lowest fidelity score on the site.
fixed bandSee what your audience compiles to on Addressable TV.
Forty-five minutes. Bring a real audience and we compile it live on Addressable TV and the other six, with the score and the lawful-basis manifest on screen.
Book a working sessionDesign-partner phase · the sandbox needs no card and no credentials · nothing here sells self-serve media
Addressable TV questions
Is this the same as buying a TV spot?
No. A spot buys everyone watching a programme. Addressable TV buys the households you selected, wherever they are watching, by swapping the ad in at the set-top box or the stream. That is why it is bought on household attributes and postcode districts rather than on programme and time, and why the fidelity question is about how well Mosaic groups proxy your audience rather than about how many people watched.
Why is 55 out of 100 worth buying at all?
Because the alternative on television is worse, not better. A 55 that you can see is a more useful number than an unlabelled demographic buy, and addressable TV grew 37% to £1.84bn in 2025 on AA/WARC figures, which tells you the money is moving rather than that the trade is a good one. The point of publishing the score is that you get to decide whether it is worthwhile for your budget, rather than finding out afterwards.