How Sky AdSmart works

A conventional television spot buys everyone watching a break. Addressable buys the households you selected, wherever they happen to be watching, by substituting the advert at the set-top box or in the stream.

That changes what you are buying from programme-and-time to household-and-attribute, and it changes the question you should ask about a proposal from 'how many people watched' to 'how well does this attribute set proxy my audience'.

It also means the effective cost per person reached depends on household size, which nobody controls and which is rarely mentioned.

The attribute catalogue is geodemographic: Experian Mosaic groups (Experian's current edition has 18 groups spanning 68 types), occupation attributes such as business owners and directors or senior decision makers in business, affluence indicators such as household income bands, and life-stage attributes such as young professionals or early technology adopters.

A brief naming a business audience becomes the closest matching attributes intersected with the postcode districts for the cities you named, and mapped to broadcast regions. AdBuyMCP's catalogue takes the top four matching attributes.

Read that as a household proxy. 'Senior decision makers in business' as an AdSmart attribute is a modelled household characteristic, not a verified job title, which is why the fidelity grade is household at 55 and why that score does not move however carefully the brief is written.

Sky's AdSmart site advertises TV from as little as £3,000. That is the seller's entry point, and the sales house applies it at booking.

Comcast's Universal Ads launched in the UK on 23 June 2026 with Channel 4, ITV and Sky, as a self-service platform, and its UK site advertises a £0 minimum spend. That changes what an entry point into UK television looks like. AdBuyMCP's Universal Ads connector is a stub, so none of that inventory is bought here.

The buying process is a booking rather than an auction. A brief goes to the sales house, clearance happens, an order is confirmed, and delivery arrives afterwards as a statement.

Clearance is the binding constraint. Copy must be approved before it airs, superlative claims need documentary substantiation, and health claims need evidence of a high standard. Clearcast asks you to allow two to three weeks, so treat the clearance clock as the real dependency rather than media availability.

Production is a genuine cost too. The broadcast mezzanine AdBuyMCP's creative studio specifies is 1920×1080 at 25fps and at least 20Mbps, with supers inside 90% title-safe and audio to EBU R128, and a social cut will not meet it.

Addressable television rewards a burst in a defined region, because the same money spread nationally buys each household far fewer chances to see the ad.

An AdBuyMCP awareness plan reaches households through streaming TV, aimed at a business market with business data where a seller offers it, and leaves addressable TV out.

AdBuyMCP's Sky AdSmart workflow goes as far as the booking paperwork: it maps an audience into the attribute vocabulary, intersects it with postcode districts and broadcast regions, grades the translation 55 out of 100, generates the booking brief, drives the clearance step and tracks the order, with every live step acknowledged by a named person quoting the sales house's own reference. It does not make the booking or report the delivery.