The Guide to TV Advertising Costs

TV ADVERTISING BY TOAST

Toast is known for beautiful TV advertising production for companies of all sizes. We expertly handle the entire production from script to screen. Running an advert on TV allows companies to build trusted brands and boost sales by putting their product in front of vast numbers of customers.

‍

‍

A QUESTION WE’RE ASKED A LOT: HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO ADVERTISE ON TV?

Answer: There are two television advertising costs: buying adverts the spots between TV shows in the UK. Rates for the smaller digital channels start around £70 to £180 for daytime and £160 to £330 for peak time. TV adverts during Good Morning Britain or Lorraine can cost between £3,500 – £4,300. And production costs for actually making the TV advert. These can range from £30,000 for a straightforward animated TV commercial to £250,000 and above for a blockbuster TV advert with top stars and a famous music track.

‍

TV ADVERTISING STATS FROM INDUSTRY BODY – THINKBOX

£5.61
TV (Linear and BVOD) average full profit ROI over a sustained period.

46.6%
Linear TV alone accounts for 46.6% of full advertising-generated profit.

£3.86
Online Video (which is mostly YouTube) has an average full profit ROI.

£1.79
TV (Linear and BVOD) short term payback per £1 spent.

‍

Source – Thinkbox Profit Ability 2 - TV Advertising 2024

‍

‍

‍

‍

ADVERTISING ON TV

Media planning is crucial to the success of your television advertising campaign. Before setting out to build a successful TV advertising campaign, it’s important to develop a robust media planning strategy.

Deciding which TV channels best fit your brand’s demographic makes sure your TV advertising costs don’t go to waste. If you’re new to TV media planning and need more information on the process of advertising on TV, do get in touch.

‍

MEDIA PLANNING GUIDELINE FIGURES

The numbers listed are a guide to the average price paid for a 30 sec TV advert on UK TV networks. Pricing does vary throughout the year.

‍

ADVERTISE ON ITV

Good Morning Britain or Lorraine ads cost are around £3,700 – £4,500
Daytime slots on ITV are around £3,900 to £4,800, and peak time slots can cost from £10,700 to £35,000.

If you’re looking for the most significant marketplace to show your adverts, you can’t do better than to advertise on ITV. Shows like Good Morning Britain offer one of the most extensive commercial opportunities in the UK. Whether you’re planning a massive TV advertising campaign or trying to target a micro-region, ITV allows media to be purchased flexibly.

ITV has an intelligent family of channels that help campaigns hit tighter demographics. Channels like ITV Be show mainly a reality-based output or CITV show kids programming. Picking one of the smaller ITV channels makes the cost of TV advertising a more compelling proposition for smaller brands. Whatever your market, there’s probably an ITV channel for you.

Like other broadcasters ITV has invested heavily in an online platform. ITVX has over 35 million registered users. ITV is broken into 15 regions which makes geo-targeting easy.

‍

INVEST IN A CHANNEL 4 ADVERT

A 30-second slot on daytime TV can cost between £1,200 to £2,300 peak rates for shows such as Made in Chelsea and Married at First Sight are around £10,000 to £20,000. Channel 4 have done a great job of acquiring top-rated shows and commissioning must-watch shows like Gogglebox. Data shows that in 2024 Channel 4 grew its streaming and linear audiences. In fact Channel 4's streaming platform has had a 32% year on year increase in viewing minutes. Great content from Channel 4 like Gogglebox (4.8 million), 24 Hours In Police Custody (4.5 million) are a good fit for younger brands.

‍

We invited Toast to pitch for our new product-focused TV campaign. They were the stand out choice from our first meeting and impressed me with how quickly they not only understood but engaged with the brand. Sue Moncur, Country Manager - Ancestry.

‍

‍

ADVERTISING ON CHANNEL 5 IS LESS EXPENSIVE THAN OTHER NETWORKS

A slot in daytime usually costs around £800 to £1,600. Peak time ad breaks can be had for £2,500 to £4,500. Channel 5 is a great place for family viewing, such as All Creatures Great and Small. Channel 5's online platform My5 has had four years of consecutive growth.

‍

ADVERTISING ON SKY

With their smaller viewing figures, the cost of advertising on TV with Sky is naturally lower, an ad slot in daytime shows on Sky costs around £170 to £260. Advertising during the peak time costs about £660 to £1,250. Sky Adsmart is a great platform that allows advertisers to target their ads to a select group of viewers. For more information about Sky see our Adsmart page.

The Sky audience are committed viewers, on average Sky customers watch four and a half hours of TV each day. Sky has an expanse of content for all the family from Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol for youngsters to Premiere League Football and F1 for adults. If you're looking to advertise your brand against sport Sky is the obvious choice.

‍

‍

HOW MUCH DOES A TV ADVERT COST?

From the numbers, you can see a TV advert campaign running for a month can easily be had for £30,000. If you want to target a wider audience, you can spend £200,000 and advertise on ITV.

Budgets can go up; if you absolutely must get in front of a vast I’m A Celebrity audience, you’re looking at spending millions on media. Hopefully, this has answered the question, How much is TV advertising?

*Data sourced from Thinkbox and TheDrum

‍

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT

At Toast, we always look to deliver high ROI for our clients. TV advertising is the best medium for producing not only short term returns, with an average of £1.79 returned for every £1 invested in the first 3-6 months. If you're looking for a boost in sales, launching a TV advertising campaign can really move the needle.

Over time the cumulative effect TV advertising (Linear & BVOD) has on your brand’s reach increases this to an average ROI of £5.61 after three years. TV delivers 54.7% of total advertising-generated profit over three years despite TV currently commanding 43.6% of average advertising budget. - Thinkbox Profit Ability 2 study 2025.

‍

‍

TV ADVERTISING COSTS UK

A media buyer handles the process of buying advert slots on TV channels. Toast has close links with many buyers who we use to manage our media buying process. The average cost of getting one person to see your advert in the UK is around 0.6p.

‍

TV MEDIA BUDGETS

TV advertising isn't just for huge brands, in 2023 30% of advertisers on UK linear TV spent less than £50,000 on their media budgets. in the next spend level 52% spent less than £250,000 on TV advertising Advertising your company and your products next to one of the big brands in a TV advert break helps build trust in new to market companies. TV Advertising is a great way to create mass appeal, which is an important step from social media advertising into the big leagues.

Advertising on TV is becoming more accessible. The lack of platform choice in PPC advertising has started to drive costs higher, and a single click can now cost upwards of £20. This increased affordability contrasts with the changes that have been happening in Pay Per Click advertising.

‍

BVOD and SVOD ADVERTISING – A BRIGHT NEW STARS

BVOD – Broadcaster Video-on-Demand and advertising on SVOD are great ways to reach people who watch less linear TV. BVOD adverts are often non-skippable, so your advert gets the viewers full attention without all the screen clutter which fights for attention on YouTube. Ampere Analysis predicted that by the end of 2024 the advertising marketplace in the streaming sector will be worth £1.1bn. That number is catching up with the linear TV advertising market which is worth £3.58bn.

‍

The number of subscribers to streamers in the UK reached around 50 million at the end of 2024. Estimates say that around 20% of Netflix UK subscribers are using the ad-supported tier. With the pull of Netflix content and the numbers signed up for ad-supported viewing Netflix has a compelling case for being in a brands marketing mix.

‍

‍

TV ADVERTISING COSTS COMPARED TO ONLINE VIDEO

Information from industry body Thinkbox puts it clearly: Spot TV advertising (linear and BVOD) averages £7.78 per thousand exposures. YouTube is pretty close at £11.63. Other online video, however, is £129. The challenge for other online video is that even though the CPM for a start is pretty low, ad avoidance is easy and is very high (for example, the average in-view time for TikTok is about 3 seconds). As a result the equivalent cost for 30 seconds of viewing time goes through the roof.

Source: 2022, Thinkbox estimates using AA/WARC, Barb, ViewersLogic, IPA TouchPoints 2022

‍

‍

TRACKING YOUR AD’S EFFECTIVENESS

One of the greatest revolutions in TV advertising has been the recent innovation in tracking the viewing of TV adverts. Previously the best way to measure a TV ad’s effectiveness was to use an offer code on the endframe, which could attribute sales to TV advertising. Advert tracking has now progressed to online software that can determine how well a media plan performs. Tracking ensures that your TV advertising cost is being multiplied and returned in profits.

It is possible to track the effectiveness of a TV ad campaign and make adjustments to the placements of ads. Tracking software can correlate a TV ad running with hits on a website or an increased sales spike in an E-commerce platform. Making changes to the media plan in the weeks after launch can get the best ROI from a media budget.

‍

GETTING A DIRECT RESPONSE

Advertising on TV is excellent at direct response (a call to action) and brand recognition. Direct response using TV advertising has become even more potent due to second screen watching. Viewers often watch TV with a tablet or smartphone nearby. A viewer seeing a URL during a direct response TV advert now has the perfect platform on hand to interact with your website.

Offering a tailored URL from the TV advert cuts down any friction a viewer might experience, rather than arriving at a website’s home page and navigating to the specific product page. A unique URL can direct the viewer straight to the product.

With a regional TV media buying strategy and DRTV advertising, unique URLs ensure the right message gets to the viewer.

*Stats sourced from Thinkbox and BARB.

‍

WORKING WITH TOAST

Get in touch with Toast if you’d like to talk about TV advertising. Use the contact form on this page to tell us about your project. If you have a project and need a briefing template, download our free TV advertising template or Video Briefing templates.

‍