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4 days ago | 
mediacat.uk | James Swift
Over two thirds (67.5%) of UK homes had access to a subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service in the first quarter of 2025, according to Barb. According to the research board’s Establishment Survey 20.1 million UK homes had access to a streaming platform in Q1. Netflix: 17.4 million UK homes, or 59.2% of homes. Only 28% of UK Netflix homes (4.8 million) were subscribed to the platform’s advertising tier, however.
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1 week ago | 
mediacat.uk | James Swift
Another media agency brand bit the dust last week, and the founder is ‘pumped’ about its demise. On Thursday, The Beyond Collective announced that it had merged Yonder Media with Above+Beyond, Frontier and Collective Studios to form a single agency, called Beyond. But unlike the so-called sunsetting taking place within WPP, this consolidation had nothing to do with balance sheets or shareholder demands, says Ed Cox, the founder of Yonder Media and now a partner at Beyond.
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2 weeks ago | 
mediacat.uk | James Swift
Channel 4 has announced that it will become the first UK broadcaster to distribute video programming on Spotify, as it continues to seek new revenue streams and build its brand among younger audiences. Starting this week, Spotify users can stream content from Channel 4.0, the broadcaster’s digital-first platform aimed at 13- to 24-year-olds, including Minor Issues, Hear Me Out, and Secret Sauce.
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3 weeks ago | 
mediacat.uk | James Swift
Homelessness charity Shelter is employing a media strategy built around the daily routines of MPs and civil servants, as part of a campaign urging the Government to invest more in social housing. The ads show hand-written notes from members of the public explaining to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, why they want more social housing, and are placed where Whitehall types are likely to encounter them as they go about their day. Yonder Media devised the media strategy.
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3 weeks ago | 
mediacat.uk | James Swift
The sun is finally shining on the open web, according to The Trade Desk’s CEO, Jeff Green. The first quarter of 2025 was a happy one for the ad-tech company. In Q4 2024, it missed its financial targets for the first time since going public and was punished pretty severely by investors. But on Thursday’s earnings call, Green got to tell analysts that his company had blown past expectations with revenue of $616m, a 25% year-on-year increase.
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1 month ago | 
mediacat.uk | James Swift
Google’s decision to give up on reforming cookie tracking has been greeted mostly with derision by the ad industry. It’s been five years since Google first articulated its plan to remove third-party cookies from its Chrome browser, 13 months since it delayed implementing the changes for the third time, and nine months since it watered down its ambitions, from all-out deprecation to an ATT-style prompt that allows users to opt out of tracking without having to navigate the privacy settings.
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1 month ago | 
mediacat.uk | James Swift
The M&A market in media, marketing, and martech has always favoured the bold — but 2025 is shaping up to favour the adaptable. We’re now entering what I’d call a Darwinian phase of dealmaking: where only the most strategically fit businesses survive, and often, that survival depends on who you partner with — or sell to. Let’s not sugar-coat it. The latest IPA Bellwether report paints a sobering picture — UK ad budgets are tightening, and core media investment is flatlining.
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1 month ago | 
mediacat.uk | James Swift
The IPA’s Q1 2025 Bellwether survey of 300 UK marketers was carried out before US President Donald Trump announced his plans to tariff the world on 2 April, which might make it even more useful as a document of the industry’s mood just before the macroeconomic mayhem began. Turns out, it wasn’t euphoric. In the survey, 24.2% of respondents said that their companies had slashed their marketing budgets for the quarter, while 19.4% had increased them.
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1 month ago | 
mediacat.uk | Natasha Randhawa |Elliot Wright |James Swift |Svilena Keane
Eighty-eight percent of Amazon Prime Video subscribers watched ads in Q4 2024, according to figures published this week by Digital i. By placing all Prime Video users on its ad-supported plan by default, Amazon has established the largest ad-supported base in global premium SVOD. That number neatly captures the current philosophy in streaming: scale first, worry about engagement later. Ad-supported tiers, once framed as a fall-back for budget-conscious users, are now the keystone of SVOD strategy.
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1 month ago | 
mediacat.uk | Elliot Wright |Svilena Keane |Natasha Randhawa |James Swift
The7stars expected steady-but-modest results when it tested Google’s Demand Gen format. Instead, it found consistent performance gains — across sectors, budgets, and brand size. ‘I think we hoped it would deliver incremental results’, said Xanthe Pickford-Avery, head of search at the agency, ‘but the consistency we saw across the board was quite surprising.’The whitepaper is based on five geographically-based experiments across retail, travel, finance, and subscription services.
