Sky Media’s Sarah Burnett on how AdSmart helps companies connect directly with their consumers

Sarah, it’s great to connect. Can you give us some insight into AdSmart from Sky’s opportunity? How does it work and how can brands use it?
Adsmart from Sky’s unique targeting capability has turned the traditional method of TV spot advertising on its head, making it affordable for businesses of any type and size – combining the power and impact of TV with the granular targeting and reportability of digital.

What makes Adsmart different is the ability to play ads directly into the households of the people you want to speak to – and more importantly not into those that you don’t. This eliminates the need to worry about which programme, channel or time of day your ad should be shown because it only plays out when you pre-selected audience is watching; delivering ads dynamically, only into your chosen households… Thus eliminating costly wastage and giving a better ROI.

As an example, if your product is in several stores across the country, we can pinpoint those stores and create a geographical radius around each of them and only serve the ad to households that fall within that radius. This can also be overlaid with additional attributes, such as affluence, age or household composition such as children or pets… All of which help to eliminate the wastage of showing an advert to someone who would just not be interested in your product or service.

What’s more, TV continues to be the most effective and trusted advertising platform there is, delivering more profit per pound spent than any other form of adverting. Additionally, your advert must be watched to at least 75% (100% on Video on Demand) before it is charged for. It’s inevitable that some people will skip the ads, but we don’t expect you to pay for it if they do.

Can you give us some examples of the type of brands who are using Adsmart?
There really isn’t a sector where we couldn’t find an appropriate audience across for both B2C and B2B campaigns. You probably wouldn’t automatically think that TV can reach a B2B audience, but what better place to target a company owner or senior decision maker within a business when they are relaxing in front of their favourite TV show.

Specifically with the retail sector though, we have everything from local heritage giftware brands such as Arran Sense of Scotland, small luxury retailers like Fine Watch Club to national brands such as Care Bears, Benefit Cosmetics and Coach. John Lewis used geographical targeting to advertise their click and collect service around regional Waitrose stores. The campaign successfully raised awareness of their click and collect service by 29%

When planning Adsmart campaigns, do you set and agree Key Performance Indicators? What do these tend to be?
Yes, it’s really important to not only know your audience but to know what you want to achieve from a campaign. This can be anything from brand awareness, brand identity, your USP or what you stand for, driving sales, store footfall or web traffic. This will not only drive your creative content but also create a robust reporting outcome. We always ask “What does success look like?” so that we are all on the same page when looking at the post campaign delivery.

I know that Adsmart use a lot of consumer data to help plan the campaigns. Can you give us a little bit more insight into this?
Using a mix of 1st party and 3rd party data, we can pinpoint the exact households that we want to serve the advert into. As a subscription service Sky has verified and robust 1st party data from our customers – this data is then overlaid with 3rd party data. This data comes from a number of sources such as supermarket club cards, Mastercard, TwentyCi, Experian Mosaic, CACI, Regit.

We’ve segmented our audience targeting over 1,200 ways – and grouped those 1,200 into 15 broad categories. Experian Mosaic features 66 different household types based on a database of over 11 billion bits of information about UK households – that’s over 450 data points per home… It gives us an extremely accurate picture of each and every one of our customer households.

This 3rd party data can also tell us about Sky households’ financial profile, attitude to new technology and purchasing behaviour informed by their use of their Mastercard amongst other sources. We know if they own their home, when they are likely to move home and even if they own a dog or a cat. It’s the most comprehensive audience segmentation of its kind.

Do you have any advice for how brands should approach the creative side of the campaigns?
We work with video production partners who will come up with a creative concept that will resonate with your target audience. It’s really important to get this right, so thinking about your audience – as well as what you want to say – is vital. A useful exercise when thinking about your audience is to create a persona… So if you had your perfect customer in front of you, what would they look like, where would they live, what’s their age, job, salary, which supermarket do they shop in? Be as specific as possible. Create a single person and give them a name – believe me it really helps to get to the heart of who your target audience is.

Feeding this into the creative will establish a real connection to your audience which in turn will increase brand recall. What we’ve learned over the last few years is that if we tailor the advert to the audience, they’re 35% more likely to engage with that advert. They’re also 49% more likely to be able to recall that advert if asked later down the line and 48% more likely to not channel swap, which is important for all of our advertisers big or small.

So whether you use a local landmark or accent, or have an emotional connection through nostalgia, laughter or even sadness, tailoring this to your target persona will be far more effective.

“What makes Adsmart different is the ability to play ads directly into the households of the people you want to speak to – and more importantly not into those that you don’t.”

You recently presented Adsmart at the Giftware Association Social Day. The audience included a number of gift brands. What was their reaction to Adsmart and how do you think it can work for gifting companies?
I started by asking everyone to think of any advertising campaign that they liked. When I asked whether it was a TV ad everyone agreed it was. Brand familiarity is important, and nothing makes you famous like TV, and because TV is heavily regulated there is a high level of consumer trust associated with it… But the perception is that TV advertising is expensive and only the brands with very deep pockets can afford it. I wanted to dispel the myth that TV advertising was out of reach, particularly to SMEs

I discussed how we use a hyper targeted audience to reduce the cost. The initial reaction was surprise that TV advertising could be a similar cost to a digital campaign. Far from being a bad thing, the perception that it’s expensive to advertise on is actually one of TV’s strengths for advertisers because they are seen as being a credible, high quality, successful and trustworthy business.

Are you targeting other product categories to increase your client base? Where do you see growth coming for Adsmart from?
We already work with a large variety of businesses across many different sectors but as more brands understand the potential for addressable advertising we continue to innovate to enable advertisers to reach their desired audience.

A key factor of Adsmart is the unique use of data matching and we continue to grow our data partners to enable us to maintain that unique position of robust data at scale. Our newest data partner is Captify – the leading search intelligence platform for the open web, connecting real time searches for sectors such as apparel or luxury goods shopping to beauty, home furnishings and pets. Also, our largest data partner Experian have a specific data set for retail ‘Mosaic Shopper’. This targeting allows us to deep dive into all aspects of the consumer retail experience, providing a rounded view of today’s hyper-connected consumer at an individual level.

As viewing continues to evolve across different platforms and devices, Sky have ensured our content is available whenever and wherever people want to watch it, extending our reach across more platforms and enabling advertisers to speak to their customers where ever they choose to consume content:

• From Live TV, where Sport and News remains central to the live linear schedule
• To On Demand – which has risen 35% in the last year: which customers access on TV, as well as Mobile, desktop and tablet
• YouTube – where we distribute the very best of our broadcast content in short form including highlight clips from Sports as well as NBCU entertainment content across movies, lifestyle and reality, which brings a new, younger profile audience to our content.
• Our websites and apps, where we have a strong and loyal user base who come to us for breaking news and highlights across news and sports. These platforms reach over 21million users per month
• Other Social channels like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat replicate the YouTube approach with a distribution of sports, news and entertainment content tailored to that platform
• Podcasts extend these Sports and News stories with regular features and news using Sky talent to dive deeper into various topics

Growth ultimately comes from the ability to reach our customers.

How do you think the advertising market is shaping up generally in 2025?
More time is being spent watching video content and brands are aligning themselves with this format more and more. Technology continues to move forward in leaps and bounds and with the continuing evolution of AI we are moving into a much more ‘digital’ world.

Video content has had the biggest growth in the past few years, across platforms such as YouTube and TikTok which have around five billion and one billion monthly unique users respectively and are at the forefront of driving video content. Social media platforms are also adding video players to their portfolios, such as Reels on Instagram. Sky’s short form video content across digital channels has around 36 million unique users plus around 350 million broadcast quality videos views every month.

There is less demand for digital display and the reduction in cookie data has meant that social media campaigns are becoming harder to target effectively – and with the advent of AI, there is the issue of trust. As TV is highly regulated, there is a guarantee that what you’re being told has been verified and checked, and so trust with TV is higher than any other media.

We launched AdSmart 10 years ago as a live TV proposition with a handful of channels, now we’ve amassed to broadcasting ads across 127 channels. We have also extended our addressable capability into Broadcaster Video on Demand, which spans across our streamed content. This includes connected TV apps as well as Sky and media partner players. Our addressable proposition is available on 50 devices across Sky and Virgin TV platforms, as well as connected TVs, games consoles and mobile devices.

Finally do you have an all-time favourite TV commercial?
Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” from 2010. Proctor and Gamble were facing a problem that Old Spice was a brand of the Seventies, regarded as unfashionable and only bought by the old men who had used it all their lives. So, with that aging market sales of the brand were dwindling. This refresh was aimed at creating a more appealing brand image to a younger audience within an environment where couples would be watching together

The advert is a parody of stereotypical masculinity, I love it because it’s so tongue-in-cheek. Delivered as a monologue of one liners by ‘the perfect man’, creating talkability and ultimately fame going on to be a social media sensation. It’s just brilliantly creative.

Thanks Sarah. Last question, what’s the best way for someone to reach out if they’re interested in engaging with AdSmart?
My email, at [email protected].