The UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, ITV announced last week that they will soon be launching a new programmatic advertising platform.

The news comes after ITV signed an exclusive UK and Ireland licensing agreement with Amobee, a global digital advertising technology company, for end-to-end programmatic buying and selling of premium video inventory on the ITV Hub. The ITV Hub currently has over 28 million subscribers, with over 79% of all 16-34-year olds in the country registered on the service.

The fully programmatic, premium advanced advertising platform will be uniquely built using Amobee’s advertising technology. This will allow advertisers complete control over the purchasing of their campaigns across the ITV Hub. The new functionality suggests that ITV will now give advertisers the ability to deliver mass simultaneous reach, alongside targeted, data-driven addressable advertising on the Hub, making it more appealable to a wider range of advertisers whilst maximising the commercial return for ITV.

The platform will give advertisers the opportunity for customer-controlled programmatic buying, with advanced data-enabled targeting. The dashboard allows advertisers the functionality to plan and buy their VOD campaigns, at their pace, whenever and wherever they want.

From an advertising perspective, we think it’s great to see ITV taking this step, but there is still a long way to go with regards to addressable targeting from digital to linear and the data points that will power that. If you have any TV advertising queries, feel free to get in touch with our TV team here at Medialab.