Britain’s SMEs are finally advertising on CTV. The next challenge is keeping them.

Big Tech didn’t get big by gorging on Fortune 500 ad budgets alone. Meta, Google, Amazon and TikTok built their empires on thousands of small businesses spending a few hundred or thousands of pounds a month by making inventory easy to buy and measure.

U.K. TV broadcasters have been trying to claw back some of that small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) spend for years. In fact, half of ITV’s advertisers already spend less than £50,000 a year, according to Kate Waters, the broadcaster’s director of client strategy and commercial marketing, speaking at the CTV World Summit in London.

The real question dominating the summit was how to keep SMEs spending on TV. The answer, unsurprisingly, is proving that TV works and making it as simple and measurable as the Big Tech platforms are used to. Industry leaders highlighted progress in buying and measurement tools, even as they bemoaned that more work remains to truly match Big Tech’s ad ecosystem.

For broadcasters, cracking this is existential. As streaming becomes the primary distribution mode, growth must come from SME spend, said Tom Morrod, co-founder and research director at Caretta Research. Last year, SMEs spent around £18 billion on digital ads in the U.K., but much of that went to Big Tech.

“When you become a streamer, you have a lot of different options about how you can present your inventory and how you can place inventory against your content,” he said.

When TV works for the small advertiser

Some SMEs are already privy to these new opportunities.

Deirdre Mc Gettrick, founder of furniture comparison platform ufurnish.com, told the summit she spent five years building her brand on digital ads before investing in CTV through a media-for-equity deal with ITV.

“The last five years of purely digital didn’t drive that,” she said, referring to the brand awareness she’d been chasing. Since going on CTV, her metrics have shifted.

“Conversion is up by two points. So when we click somebody out to a retailer, we were converting at about 3%. It’s now 5%.”

But the effects went beyond conversion rates. Retail partners who’d ignored her outreach previously started calling back. “One guy had been ignoring me for ages on emails, and he saw the ad, and he’s like, ‘Sorry, I’ve been ignoring you. I saw your ad. Let’s set up a coffee next week.’”

Proving the value of TV

The TV ad buying experience is due to get an upgrade for smaller U.K. advertisers, as ITV, Channel 4 and Sky prepare to launch a joint self-serve marketplace in the U.K. powered by Comcast’s Universal Ads platform.

Comcast recently appointed David Shaw, who helped launch Snap’s global self-serve ad business, to lead the rollout. Meanwhile, AI creative tools like Magnite’s streamr.ai are helping to lower production costs. On the measurement side, Lantern, a cross-broadcaster measurement initiative backed by ITV, Sky and Channel 4, will be built directly into Universal Ads.

But TV players are up against entrenched incumbents and their black box measurement capabilities. For the SME spending £30,000 a year through a Big Tech self-serve platform, that kind of closed-loop reporting — linking pounds to sales, even if the methodology may be hidden from view — is what they’ve come to expect when buying media.

In this respect, YouTube remains the No. 1 competitor to British TV, even as the platform has pulled out of Barb’s industry-standard cross-platform measurement in the U.K., raising questions about whether it wants TV budgets while shirking TV-level scrutiny.

When it comes to proving the value of TV buys, Waters said ITV is already adapting to the changing media landscape, with plans to study how TV advertising drives visibility in AI-powered search.

“We have to be much better at aligning measurement against the objectives of the campaign. We talk a lot about marketing performance, not performance marketing. That’s the business that we should be doing,” she said.