For startups outgrowing Meta and Google

We’ll manage your first TV, podcast or billboard test for £2,500 plus VAT.

James Rooney, who wrote AdBuyMCP, plans two or three new channels with you, prepares every line for your sign-off and writes up what it told you, over ten weeks from kick-off. You pay the sellers directly, at least £7,500 across the whole test (the managed-test media minimum), and our fee of £2,500 plus VAT is invoiced only when you’ve approved the written plan.
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Create your account with an email link, no card. Plan and review your campaign in a private workspace. Funding and live media remain subject to their separate approval and readiness checks.

fixed fee, plus VAT at 20%
£2,500
managed-test media minimum, paid by you to the sellers
£7,500
from kick-off to the written readout
10 weeks
of your media taken by us during the test
0%
when you payOur fee is invoiced only when you approve the written plan

how it works

Your test takes four steps, and the ten weeks start at kick-off.

  1. 01

    You tell James who your customer is.

    Book a free 30-minute call from the calendar on this page and bring one sentence about your customer and the budget you have in mind. If a test fits, you plan it together on the call, which is rather quicker than the fortnight a media plan used to take, and the written plan follows: the two or three channels worth trying, every line costed and scored for how precisely it reaches your customer. It also says which questions your budget can answer before a pound is spent.

  2. 02

    You approve the written plan, and only then are you invoiced.

    Approving it means signing a short agreement that sets the channels, the dates, your decision rule and which of your seller accounts or sales-house orders each line runs through. You pay before kick-off, and you can withdraw for a full refund until then.

  3. 03

    James prepares every line for your sign-off.

    Where a seller lets you add James as a user without making him liable for your media, he builds the campaign inside your account. Everywhere else, Universal Ads included, he hands you a complete pack and you press submit. For Sky AdSmart and cinema he drafts the brief, the insertion order and the clearance paperwork for you to sign, and a named person at the sales house confirms the booking. Every account is in your company’s name, and you pay each seller directly.

  4. 04

    He watches it run and writes it up.

    Your lines run for five weeks. James checks each one against the plan in the sellers’ own reports, which you share for any account he isn’t a user on, and sends you a short note each week. By the readout date, the end of week ten unless your plan set a later one, you have the readout: what ran, what each line cost, what people did and whether the test could say what it caused, with his recommendation to scale, change or stop each channel. Two weeks later you decide what happens next.

what the fee pays for

Each seller has made its own channel easy to buy, and your fee pays for the work between them.

Getting in is the easy part now. Universal Ads sells streaming TV on ITVX, Channel 4 and Sky with a £0 minimum spend. Spotify’s voice actors make audio ads for free for now (Spotify says this may change), Acast’s self-serve podcast ads start from $250, and Sky says AdSmart starts from as little as £3k. TV takes small budgets too: 598 advertisers spent under £50k on it in 2025. The old route to a TV test began with a rate card and a sales-house lunch. The new one begins with a sign-up form and then, it turns out, quite a lot of paperwork.

Your £2,500 plus VAT pays for that paperwork and everything around it: choosing the two or three channels that suit your customer, the cinema and Sky AdSmart bookings that still go through a sales team, clearance, a measurement design agreed before launch, and a readout that keeps what was delivered apart from what it caused.

When we checked on 12 October 2026, every published package price we found covered one channel: Klaxon’s managed audio campaigns, Loud! OOH’s billboard packages and Tempa’s test on Meta, LinkedIn or Google Search. For £2,500 plus VAT, James plans and manages one test across two or three of streaming TV, podcasts, billboards and cinema, and writes one readout for all of them.

Here is what an agency and the other routes cost.

Doing it yourself
costs nothing in fees, and you work out each seller’s platform, paperwork and lead times yourself, one at a time.
A UK paid-media agency’s starter retainer
starts at £850 a month, or 10% of your ad spend where that’s more, at one agency we checked, and at £1,500 a month on a three-month initial term at another.
A UK fractional CMO
costs £3,000 to £10,000 a month, or £700 to £1,400 a day.
Klaxon’s BOOST audio campaign
is £2,499 plus VAT for four weeks, with your ad played 100,000 times.
Tempa’s ad test
is US$5,000 for a 30-day test on one channel, Meta, LinkedIn or Google Search, with the ad spend paid separately to the platform.

Sources, all desk research checked on 12 October 2026:

before you pay

Your plan tells you what your budget can prove before you spend it.

Before anything books, your measurement design runs a power check for a matched-market geo test, at a 5% significance level and 80% power. If your spend and sales can power one, the test is part of your managed first test and the readout reports what it found. If they can’t, the plan says so before you pay and gives the number of sample days a powered test would need.

Your readout keeps delivered, responded, caused and remembered in separate sections, built from the sellers’ own reports and your outcome data. A readout that says “this budget can show delivery and response, and here’s what proving cause would take” will survive a board meeting better than a confident lift number on slide 34.

how the power check works

Every line in your plan carries a fidelity score: how much of your audience made it into that channel’s own targeting language. No competitor publishes one. These are the published bands for the channels a managed first test can draw on. CTV’s band is a range, and where your line lands in it depends on what you can supply, such as a customer list.

CTV & streaming TV
60 to 85
Podcast & digital audio
65
Digital out-of-home
50
Addressable TV
55
Cinema
40

see every fidelity band in one table

the offer

Our fee for a managed first test is £2,500 plus VAT, and your media goes straight to the sellers.

What it costs

£2,500 plus VAT, fixed, for every managed first test, which is £3,000 with VAT at 20%. You’re invoiced when you approve the written plan by signing the agreement, and you pay before kick-off. Nothing is booked before you’ve paid, and you can withdraw for a full refund until kick-off. After kick-off, stopping the test yourself doesn’t refund the fee. The guarantee and the illness clause below are the two cases where we refund it, and neither replaces your rights if we break the agreement. If you don’t sign within ten working days of receiving the written plan and agreement, the offer lapses and the place is released.

The fee covers one revision of the plan. Extra creative variants beyond three per channel are quoted before any work on them starts, and a test across more than three channels isn’t offered yet. You pay seller charges straight to the seller, such as a cinema clearance certificate if one is needed, and AdBuyMCP’s AI assets are extra, at their published prices, only if you choose them.

What you pay the sellers

At least £7,500 across the whole test. That is the managed-test media minimum: one figure for the test rather than a monthly one. It sits apart from the two figures on our pricing page: £2,000 a month funds two or three channels properly when you plan it yourself, and a £12,500 budget funds all seven on an awareness or consideration plan. A performance plan needs more.

You pay each seller directly, through accounts and orders in your company’s name, and the money can come out of what you already spend on Meta, Google or LinkedIn.

How long it runs

Ten weeks from the kick-off date in your agreement. Weeks one to three cover accounts, builds, paperwork and clearance, at the sellers’ own lead times. Your lines then run for five weeks, and the written readout reaches you by the end of week ten. Your decision date is two weeks after that. If your budget can power a matched-market geo test that needs a longer window after the flight, the plan moves the readout date and tells you before you sign.

What you get
  • Before you pay anything, a free 30-minute call and then a one-page written plan for up to three channels, every line costed at the seller’s price and scored for fidelity. You keep the plan whether or not you go ahead.
  • A measurement design and your own decision rule, agreed in writing before launch: the result that would make you spend more, and the one that would make you stop.
  • Every line prepared for its seller: built inside your account where a seller lets you add James as a user without making him liable for your media, or handed over as a complete pack with the approved creative and settings, as every Universal Ads line is.
  • The cinema and Sky AdSmart paperwork for you to sign: briefs, insertion orders and clearance.
  • Your existing creative adapted to each seller’s specification, up to three variants per channel, and sent for clearance.
  • A check of the media-matching schemes and airtime competitions you might qualify for. Anything you win is yours.
  • A short written note each week your lines are live.
  • A written readout that recommends scaling, changing or stopping each channel.
  • You keep everything made for you: the plan, the paperwork, the creative and the readout, and your seller accounts stay in your company’s name.
What you give

The fee and the media, and about four hours of meetings across the ten weeks. On top of those, you open your seller accounts and send a weekly export of the outcome numbers the test is judged on. Spotify verifies your UK VAT number at sign-up, and Acast validates your business before you can book.

You also set a spending limit on each seller account to match the lines you approve, and share the creative you already have.

A 30-minute conversation at the readout about what the product got right and wrong. A public reference is optional, never a condition of the price.

What happens to the platform fee

You pay none during the test, because your media doesn’t pass through AdBuyMCP. If you later buy media through one of AdBuyMCP’s own buying connections, it pays the published platform fee: 10% of media, dropping to 5% plus £749 a month once trailing 30-day spend passes £25,000. Those connections are open to paid design partners, a separate offer on our pricing page, as each one clears the platform’s go-live standard, and none has cleared it yet.

How it ends

On your decision date you choose to carry on or stop, at prices written into your agreement, and nothing renews on its own. If you stop, you keep everything and owe nothing more, and James’s access to your seller accounts is removed.

If you carry on, James can keep your channels running as a managed month, for a management fee of 10% of media, dropping to 5% plus £749 a month once trailing 30-day spend passes £25,000, with a minimum fee of £1,250 a month, and you can stop at any month end. Or you can plan the next test yourself in the free planner and book it in the sellers’ own tools.

What the guarantee covers

If any line James prepares isn’t ready by the end of week three, or the written readout hasn’t reached you by the readout date in your agreement, you get your whole fee back. The readout date is the end of week ten unless your plan set a later one before you signed. Ready means built in your account, or delivered to you in writing as a complete pack with the approved creative and settings.

Make a written claim within 30 days of the readout date, and it’s paid within 14 days to the account you paid from. It applies when you’ve funded the sellers so each line can go live, and given the approvals, account access, creative and outcome data your agreement asks for by its dates. Pausing a live line doesn’t affect it: the readout reports that line up to the day it stopped.

It doesn’t apply to seller checks such as Spotify’s VAT verification and Acast’s business validation, to a seller or Clearcast turning down an ad, to the sellers’ own lead times, or to lines you build without the pack. It covers our fee, never the media, and it doesn’t cover lift, CAC or sales.

If James can’t work, his work on your test pauses for up to ten working days. If he still can’t work after that, your whole fee is refunded.

How many tests run at once

James takes up to three new tests a quarter and runs no more than two at once, because he does every test himself and expects each to take about 60 hours of his time.

How a test starts

Book the 30-minute call from the calendar on this page. If a test fits, James plans it with you on the call; if another route suits your budget better, he’ll say which. Every test follows the same order: call, written plan, agreement, payment, kick-off. You can also create an account first and put your customer into the planner yourself, and bring that plan to the call.

Your agreement is with the operating company named in our terms. Read the terms.

who it suits

This test suits a funded startup with a new channel to try.

It’s built for you if:

  • You lead growth at a UK startup between seed and Series B, and Meta and Google carry most of your acquisition. Meta’s average price per ad rose 12% year on year in each of the first two quarters of 2026, across all its markets.
  • You can approve £2,500 plus VAT yourself, and fund at least £7,500 across the whole test (the managed-test media minimum) from a budget you already have.
  • You’ve wondered about streaming TV, podcasts, billboards or cinema and haven’t had a spare week to work out the route.
  • You’d like the legwork done for you and still want to approve every line yourself.

It’s the wrong buy if:

  • Your whole test budget is under £7,500 of media. Below the managed-test media minimum the fee would be more than a third of your media, so you’re better off planning it yourself and booking it in the sellers’ own tools.
  • You’d rather make the media calls yourself, which is what the product is for. Start with the free planner on the homepage.
  • You only want streaming TV, and fast. Universal Ads direct is the better buy.
  • Your next test is on Meta, LinkedIn or Google Search, where Tempa’s one-channel test is built for you, or audio alone, where Klaxon’s managed packages are.
  • You need a promised lift, CAC or sales figure, linear TV spots or an agency on retainer.
  • You want an account team on call. James, who wrote the code, does all the work on your test himself.

questions

These are the questions to settle before you book a call.

What’s the least we need to spend on a managed first test?

£7,500 of media across the whole test, paid by you to the sellers (the managed-test media minimum), plus our fee of £2,500 plus VAT. If you plan it yourself in the product instead, about £2,000 a month funds two or three channels properly, and all seven channels fund from a budget of about £12,500 on an awareness or consideration plan. A performance plan needs more.

What does the £2,500 plus VAT pay for, and do you take a cut of our media?

It pays for the work around your media once you’ve signed: the measurement design, a revision of the plan if you want one, every line prepared for its seller, the cinema and Sky AdSmart paperwork, your creative adapted and sent for clearance, a note each week you’re live, and the readout. The call and the plan it produces cost nothing, whether or not you go ahead. We expect the paid work to take about 60 hours of the founder’s time. We take no cut of your media during the test, because it never passes through AdBuyMCP. If you later buy media through one of AdBuyMCP’s own buying connections, it pays the platform fee: 10% of media, dropping to 5% plus £749 a month once trailing 30-day spend passes £25,000.

When do we pay for a managed test, and can we back out?

The call and the plan it produces cost nothing. You’re invoiced when you approve the written plan by signing the agreement, and you pay before kick-off. Until kick-off you can withdraw for a full refund. After kick-off you can pause any self-serve line yourself, because it sits in your account, and the readout reports it up to the day it stopped; cinema and Sky AdSmart bookings follow that seller’s cancellation terms. After kick-off, stopping the test yourself doesn’t refund the fee: the guarantee and the illness clause are the two cases where we refund it, and neither replaces your rights if we break the agreement.

Who actually does the work, and what happens if James is ill?

James Rooney, the founder, who wrote AdBuyMCP’s code. He takes the call, plans the test with you, prepares every line and writes the readout, and nobody else works on your test, which is why he runs no more than two at once. If he can’t work, his work on your test pauses for up to ten working days, and if he still can’t work after that, your whole fee is refunded. Your media stays in your accounts throughout.

Whose name is on the media contracts, and who pays the sellers?

Yours. Your company opens each seller account or signs each sales-house order, and pays the seller directly at the seller’s prices. AdBuyMCP invoices only its own fee and never holds your media money. Your agreement for the test is with the operating company named in our terms.

Can you get our first TV test onto ITVX, Channel 4 or Sky?

Your company can, and James does the legwork. Streaming TV on ITVX, Channel 4 and Sky’s streaming services is sold through Universal Ads’ own self-serve platform, which has no minimum spend and states its charges in US dollars. You open the account and submit the campaign James prepares for it. Sky AdSmart books through Sky’s sales team: James writes the brief and the paperwork, and you sign the booking. AdBuyMCP doesn’t buy ITV, Sky or Channel 4 airtime itself, so a person prepares every line of your test and you approve each one. Linear TV spots aren’t part of a managed first test.

How soon will the first line of a managed test be live?

Spotify and programmatic digital billboards can start while anything else is in clearance, and your plan gives every line a live date before you sign. Clearcast asks advertisers to allow two to three weeks to clear a TV ad. Acast host-read podcast ads typically take four to six weeks from proposal to launch, so a ten-week plan uses produced audio ads instead. Bauer Media Outdoor wants digital artwork two weeks before the start date. Your lines run for five of the ten weeks.

Will the readout tell us whether TV worked, and what do we tell the board about brand?

It will if your spend and sales can power a matched-market test, and the plan tells you whether they can before you spend. The readout grades four questions separately: was it delivered, did people respond, did it cause anything, and do people remember it? If your spend and sales can’t power a matched-market test, the readout says so and gives the sample days a powered test would need. If your board asks about brand, the plan grades before launch whether your budget can answer “remembered”, and tells you if it can’t.

What creative do we need for a managed first test?

A test can start from assets you already have. Spotify’s voice actors produce audio ads for free for now (Spotify says this may change), Sky’s AI creative toolkit for smaller advertisers makes a TV ad from your website with Clearcast approval built in, and Universal Ads’ creative partners turn social assets into TV creative at prices they set. TV ads still go through Clearcast, whose standard clearance is free to advertisers for ads up to five minutes long. James adapts what you have to each seller’s specification, up to three variants per channel. AdBuyMCP’s AI assets are there at their published prices if you want them, such as 50p an image and £1.25 a voiceover.

What happens when the managed test ends?

Two weeks after the readout, on the decision date in your agreement, you choose to carry on or stop, and nothing renews on its own. If you stop, you keep the plan, the paperwork, the creative and the readout, and your seller accounts stay yours. If you carry on, James can keep your channels running as a managed month: 10% of media, dropping to 5% plus £749 a month once trailing 30-day spend passes £25,000, with a minimum fee of £1,250 a month, and you can stop at any month end. Or you can plan the next test yourself and book it in the sellers’ own tools.

How do we start a managed test?

Book a 30-minute call from the calendar on this page. James takes every call himself. On the call you get either a plan for the test, or the reason it isn’t a fit and the route that suits you better. If you’d like to see a plan first, create an account and put your customer into the planner yourself.

Can we run a bigger managed test?

Not yet. A test across more than three channels, or one made bigger so that a matched-market test can be powered, gets its own price once the first managed tests have run, because that price should come from timed work rather than a guess. If the budget you already have can power a matched-market test, that test is part of your managed first test, and the plan sets the readout date it needs before you sign. Extra creative variants beyond three per channel are quoted before any work on them starts.

If you’d like the limits before you book, the trust page sets out which connectors are built, whether any has spent money yet and how your data is handled.

Trust and limits

the next step

Your first test beyond Meta and Google starts with a 30-minute call.

Pick a slot, bring one sentence about your customer and the budget you have in mind, and James plans the test with you on the call. Nothing is invoiced until you’ve approved a written plan, and if another route suits your budget better, he’ll say which.

Create account Book a working session
Email signup, no card. Start with a campaign plan. · Live spend is open to paid design partners.

See how the power check works

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