Channels and formats
What is addressable TV?
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what it means here
Here is what the term means for a UK buyer
The definition above holds anywhere. Buying media in the UK adds the detail below, including where AdBuyMCP does something different.
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 fidelity grade is household: you are buying homes whose profile over-indexes on the attribute you asked for. AdBuyMCP's catalogue grades it 55 out of 100, fixed, because the vocabulary cannot express more however much audience detail the brief adds, and naming a city the UK geography table cannot map lowers it by fifteen points. AA/WARC put UK addressable TV at £1.84bn in 2025, up 37%, counting streaming, pause ads and FAST channels as well as linear addressable. Addressable TV sits outside an AdBuyMCP awareness plan, which reaches households through streaming TV.
How is addressable TV booked in the UK?
Addressable TV is booked through a sales house, with no self-serve auction in front of it. A brief goes to the sales house, the copy clears Clearcast, the order is confirmed, and delivery comes back afterwards as a statement. AdBuyMCP's Sky AdSmart workflow goes as far as that paperwork: it generates the brief with the household attributes and the geography, drives the clearance step and tracks the order, and a named person at the sales house makes the booking.
Sky's AdSmart site advertises TV from as little as £3,000, which makes that the seller's entry point for a burst. Clearcast asks advertisers to allow two to three weeks for clearance, and clearance usually sets the air date.
What can addressable TV target?
You select an intersection of household attributes (Experian Mosaic groups, occupation and affluence attributes, life-stage indicators) with postcode districts and broadcast regions, and the compiler takes the top four attributes that match your brief. A television set has no way to know who is watching, so a job title or an intent signal cannot be selected, and a business brief becomes a household proxy.
The postcode geography is the compensation. It gives you markets to hold out, so an addressable buy can carry a geo-lift test, which a national linear buy cannot.
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related terms
These terms sit next to this one
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 describes that translation, so it makes no forecast of reach or performance and says nothing about the quality of the media.
same group
These terms are also in Channels and formats
The channels UK advertisers buy, and the words the sellers use for them.