If you told me five years ago that Sky would buy ITV’s broadcasting arm, I would have laughed you out of the room.
But the provisional agreement is real, and it represents a monumental shift for our industry. Not long ago, a tie-up of this scale would have been completely unthinkable to industry insiders and regulators alike. Yet here we are. At Reigning Media, we are massive champions of TV, and we see this as a vital moment for UK media, assuming we can still call it that given Sky’s American ownership, to finally stand up to Big Tech.
What it means for advertisers
For the TV advertising landscape, the benefits could be transformative. Bringing ITV’s massive linear audience and ITVX streaming footprint fully into Sky’s sophisticated addressable landscape by leveraging tools like AdSmart will supercharge cross-platform targeting and drastically simplify buying at scale. It offers agencies a far clearer route to audience reach in an increasingly fragmented digital ecosystem.
A word of caution
However, we must urge caution. Channel 4 remains a crucially important pillar of our industry. With the landscape shifting so dramatically, will they secure the ad-representation rights to some of Sky’s channel partners to maintain market balance? Without healthy competition across all major public service broadcasters, commercial flexibility for brands could easily suffer.
Protect the people who make it work
More importantly, we have a human responsibility to protect our workforce. Sky previously offshored all of their ad operations and assistants to India, which, frankly, has been a shit show for campaign delivery and communication. Anyone who works in media planning or buying knows the sheer frustration of chasing lost bookings, broken process flows, and missed deadlines caused by that move. We cannot allow this merger to decimate the UK junior jobs market with further offshoring.
Consolidating scale to fight Silicon Valley is smart, but it should not come at the expense of our entry-level talent or operational excellence at home. I started my career as an assistant at Sky and it was genuinely some of the best years of my life. That hands-on experience built the entire foundation of my understanding of media, from sales operations through to client management. How else can anyone learn the business and the industry if those vital entry points are sliced away?
We need to build a future for British broadcasting that strengthens our national workforce instead of stripping out its bottom rungs. Broadcasters must understand that long-term commercial success relies on talented humans on the ground just as much as clever technology. If we sacrifice our young talent now to chase quick cost savings, we are eating our own seed corn and leaving the industry without its next generation of leaders.
