Published July 23
If you want to spread the word about your business, get on TV. But it’s easier said than done: TV advertising has historically been expensive and complicated to arrange.
Two recent announcements, however, have lowered the barriers to entry for TV advertising, expanding who can access this premium inventory and how they buy it. This June, Walmart entered an agreement to buy Vibe.co, a self-serve connected TV (CTV) advertising platform built for small and midsized businesses, in a deal reported by The Wall Street Journal to be worth $1.4 billion.
“This is good news because it lowers the barrier to entry for CTV, particularly for small and midsized businesses that may have found TV advertising too complex in the past,” Martin Kristiseter, CEO at Digital Remedy, told Marketing Dive.
And Comcast’s Universal Ads launched in the U.K., allowing small firms to buy airtime across ITV, Channel 4 and Sky — historic rivals that have spent decades fighting over the same large advertising accounts — through a single interface.
Together, the Walmart deal and Universal Ads’ U.K. expansion point to television’s next growth opportunity: making premium video inventory accessible to millions of smaller advertisers that have traditionally relied on social media.
“Back in the year 2000, there was about 300,000 advertisers in the U.K.,” said David Shaw, head of global expansion at Universal Ads, who spent the previous 15 years working at social platforms. “I think today there’s about 3 million advertisers or small businesses that are advertising in the U.K.”
But they’re not all on TV — which explains why ITV, Channel 4 and Sky have pooled their inventory.
“There’s a leap of faith that goes with that,” Shaw said. “They almost talked each other into it.”
Sean Cunningham, president and chief executive of the Video Advertising Bureau, argues broadcasters and streamers are chasing SMB budgets because those advertisers now arrive with data attached. “Ad revenue from SMBs is the next gold rush for broadcasters and streamers,” he said, pointing to an ever-expanding trove of hard outcomes data across product categories from non-enterprise advertisers — direct-to-consumer brands and new-to-TV names among them — with the ability to drive immediate customer traffic at scale.
But this is not about displacing the Fortune 500. Most of the smaller businesses launching TV campaigns in 2026 represent “pure new money,” Cunningham said, seeking performance and brand building at once. Many of the proof points from those campaigns, he added, serve as a refresher to the broader advertiser base on how premium video builds sales and brands simultaneously — and transparently — “especially to many major advertisers coming to grips with their over-rotation into the mega and opaque walled gardens.”
Making television “as easy to buy as social”
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s 2026 digital video report, the proportion of smaller advertising spenders investing in CTV rose from 60% in 2024 to 85% in 2026. Self-serve platforms, the organization said, were lowering the barriers to entry.
What kept smaller businesses away from television was, Shaw argued, largely in their heads — though not entirely. “Perception is 90% of it,” he said. The remainder, he concedes, was structural: Advertisers had to negotiate directly with broadcasters, spend a lot of cash on programmatic platforms and learn a new vocabulary.
Universal Ads’ pitch, honed during more than a year of operation in the U.S., is to make television “as easy to buy as social.” To do that, the company has tackled each issue.
While there’s no minimum spend for advertisers in the U.S. and now U.K., there are slight differences between the buying process. In the U.S., an advertiser can enter its card details, upload an ad and launch a campaign almost immediately. Every advertisement in the U.K. must still pass through Clearcast, the body that checks television commercials before they are broadcast.
Finding new audiences
For online advertisers familiar with granular data, a measurement pixel, which can be installed through a Shopify app or Google Tag Manager, follows viewers from seeing an advert on TV to visiting a website, signing up or adding an item to their basket. “It’s the language that they’re used to,” Shaw said.
The process is beneficial because it reaches customers that advertisers otherwise might not. “A large group of [households] may not use TikTok. They may not be on Instagram on a daily basis,” Shaw said. Universal Ads says the publishers on its U.S. platform can reach more than 90% of American households, while the U.K. partnership brings together broadcasters watched by millions of people each week.
For Jamie Finstein, vice president of the Media Center at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, it’s about making TV more accessible. “For a long time, if you were a small business, TV advertising felt like something reserved for national brands with big budgets and agencies,” she says. “Streaming has changed that. Campaigns can start smaller and advertisers have a much clearer picture of what’s working.”
The comparison she draws is with the last two decades of online advertising. As the barriers come down, she argues, broadcasters and streaming platforms have an opportunity to introduce a whole new class of advertisers to television, much the way digital advertising broadened its own advertiser base. “As more businesses discover TV as a viable advertising channel, the marketplace becomes deeper and more dynamic.”
One of the businesses preparing to make that leap is Klyk, a three-year-old circular IT company turning over around £3.7 million. It was one of five businesses to win Channel 4 Sales’ B Corp competition, giving it a share of £600,000 in free airtime. Its first TV placement is due to run in September.
For Asad Hamir, co-founder of Klyk, the cost of advertising put television beyond the company’s reach. “We’ve not done it because of being a startup and not having the funds for anything like this historically,” he said. Klyk’s free campaign will act as a test. “If this works, then we can really scale this up,” he said.