Addressable TV
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
In the UK this mostly means Sky AdSmart, with ITV and Channel 4 reachable through their own routes. Households are selected on Experian Mosaic groups and CACI attribute combinations intersected with postcode districts, which is why the honest fidelity grade is household rather than person: you are buying homes whose profile over-indexes on the attribute you asked for. AdBuyMCP grades it 55 out of 100, fixed — no amount of audience detail moves it, because the vocabulary cannot express more than that. Only an unmappable city moves it, and only downward, by fifteen points. It was the fastest-growing channel in this set at £1.84bn and 37% growth in 2025 on AA/WARC figures. We do not buy UK broadcast inventory today; these are booking-paperwork rails.
Goes deeper: How addressable TV compiles
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Connected TV (CTV)
Advertising delivered inside streaming television on an internet-connected device: a smart TV, a streaming stick, a games console. It is bought like digital media, with audience targeting and impression-level reporting, but watched like television, full-screen and usually unskippable.
Linear TV
Traditional broadcast television bought as spots against programmes and time slots, where everyone watching that break sees the same advert. Priced on predicted audience delivery rather than on individual impressions.
Experian Mosaic
A UK geodemographic classification that assigns every household to one of a set of named types based on demography, affluence, life stage and location. Used to select households for addressable television and direct media.
Fidelity score
A published score out of 100 answering one question: how much of an audience definition survives translation into a channel's native targeting words. It is a property of that translation rather than a forecast, and it is not a quality rating.
More on channels and formats
The seven things you can actually buy, and the words the sellers use for them.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through