These answers cover buying the awkward channels.

It can buy screens in places where business decision makers are disproportionately present, at hours when they are there. That is a statement about a place and a time, and it is a legitimate way to reach a business audience. It is not targeting a person, and any proposal that describes it as though a screen knows who is in front of it is describing something that does not exist. AdBuyMCP's catalogue grades the whole channel geo-cohort for exactly this reason.

No. You need it to make audience-index claims about specific screens. Without it you can still select by venue type, by polygon and by daypart, which covers most of what a plan actually needs, and you can still buy through the exchanges. What changes is the language on the plan: you describe the place and the hours rather than an audience percentage, and the claim you make afterwards is correspondingly smaller and correspondingly defensible.

Because the vendor APIs target specific numeric unit identifiers and there is no verified translation from venue types and postcode polygons into those identifiers. Producing one would mean matching a semantic venue class against a vendor's own inventory taxonomy and trusting the result enough to spend money on it. Until that translation is contract-tested against a live catalogue, activation requires hand-picked units, and AdBuyMCP's supply ledger grades the connector as built rather than live.

On the self-serve tools it is low. Spotify's Ad Studio starts at £250 a campaign with a $15 minimum average daily budget, and Acast has quoted $250, £250 or €250 for its self-serve. Host reads on Acast's marketplace have no published minimum and are priced per show per week, and Global's AdPower publishes no minimum.

Acast says four to six weeks on its sponsorships marketplace: one to two weeks for the podcaster to review your proposal, and one to two weeks for the script and recording. A self-serve spot is quicker, because it needs only the tool's own approval.

Start with a spot if the aim is to learn. It is cheaper, it can be targeted and reported on, and a promo code shows you the response quickly. Move to host reads once you know which shows' listeners respond, because a host read costs more per thousand and takes weeks to arrange.

The lowest published entry points are self-serve and addressable. Universal Ads advertises a £0 minimum across Channel 4, ITV and Sky inventory, Sky advertises AdSmart from £3,000, and STV's self-service calculator books Scottish regions from one week. Standard Clearcast clearance is free. Making the film is a separate cost this guide does not estimate.

It includes streaming TV, as one of four channels inside one monthly price from £3,000 a month. AdBuyMCP does not buy ITV, Sky or Channel 4 broadcast inventory, and addressable TV sits outside the plan.

It can show that the ad clears and runs, and whether response moves in the region you bought. Proving that television caused sales needs a geo test with enough conversions in the test region to detect the lift you care about, and many startups do not have them yet. Check the worked power table before you book.

What does each line cost me in total, including data and fees, and who executes it? Those two together surface most of what is usually hidden: the segment uplift that sits on top of the media, the intermediary chain between you and the publisher, and whether a line is a programmatic buy or a piece of paperwork with a lead time. A plan that answers both readily is a plan whose author has done the work.

Usually, if you compare the fees alone. On total cost it depends entirely on who operates the seat: an agency fee includes a person, and a DSP fee does not. So add the cost of whoever runs the DSP before you compare it with the agency fee.

No. Connected TV can be bought through a DSP, through a specialist performance-CTV platform, directly from some sellers, or through a layer that buys on your behalf. A DSP makes sense for CTV when it is part of a wider programmatic plan you are already running; it makes less sense when CTV is the only programmatic line you have.

Ask the sales house, because matching a named list on addressable TV is a conversation with Sky. AdBuyMCP does not buy addressable TV and has no account-list or CRM ingestion, so it cannot do that matching for you.

Because you are buying a selected set of households, and the sales house builds that selection against attributes it holds. The cost of that is process: a minimum spend rather than a minimum weight, a booking made by a person, clearance before broadcast, and a delivery statement rather than a report you can pull. Plan against the two to three weeks Clearcast asks for, more than against media availability.

No, and this is the single most common misreading of an addressable plan. An attribute says the household over-indexes on something (occupation, income, life stage) against the general population. The person in front of the television at the moment your ad plays may be anyone in the house, which is exactly why AdBuyMCP's catalogue grades the channel household rather than person, at 55 out of 100.

No. You can select household attributes that model occupation and seniority, such as business owners and directors or senior decision makers in business. These are modelled household characteristics rather than verified titles. The set-top box addresses the household and cannot tell which person in it is watching. That is why the fidelity grade for a business audience here is household at 55 out of 100, and why the score does not improve with a better brief.

Yes, and local buying is the part of cinema most accessible to a small advertiser. DCM's rate card includes Cinemapper, a route that targets by location, at £105 per thousand admissions for a 30-second spot, and the practical floor is set by production and clearance more than by the media: a thirty-second ad has to be made, cleared and mastered whatever the size of the buy.

Plan on about eighteen days from approved plan to on-screen, which is the lead time AdBuyMCP's cinema workflow uses, and add production time if the ad does not exist. The two steps inside that window that are outside anyone's control are the CAA clearance and the digital cinema package. A campaign built around a specific release needs longer, so ask the sales house early.

Cinema targeting uses no personal data. A cinema specification is audience packs, genre packs and venue catchments, all of them aggregate, which is why this is the one channel whose lawful-basis manifest is trivially short and why AdBuyMCP's compiler records it as outside UK GDPR scope for delivery. Your own measurement of the campaign may involve personal data, and that is covered separately under your own basis.

Cinema is often worth buying for a launch and usually not for ongoing performance. It is bought in weekly bursts against a venue list and rewards concentration: the same money spread thinly across a region produces too few admissions in any one catchment to register, and a two-week regional burst is the smallest shape that does anything.