The Home of Entertainment: ITV Meets a Very Human Need

Make creative your competitive edge; unlock insights and inspiration from 100,000+ ads, rooted in emotional response, to predict and improve your creative’s business impact. Access every Ad Of The Week in our Topical Ads categories.

Last year ITV celebrated its 70th birthday with a successful year – more streams, more quickly than ever before, showing how the broadcaster has adapted to the new era of TV. Now it’s back with a new brand platform, ‘There’s No Place Like ITV’, developed by in-house agency ITV Creative.

While some brands have to make a lot of noise about not much product, ITV has the opposite problem. As its anniversary showed, ITV has a wealth of shows and history, and it’s still making culture-defining television like Mr Bates Vs The Post Office as well as innovative entertainment like this year’s Corriedale crossover. So how on earth do you communicate something that huge in a sixty-second ad?

ITV Creative have an unexpected answer: you go even bigger.

Rather than try and cram references to as many shows as possible into a hectic ad, ITV have developed a platform that gets to the heart of the brand experience. People love to get together and watch the telly, but that’s just one example of a far, far older impulse. ITV’s ad takes us from the Stone Age to the present, with stops at Shakespeare’s theatre, medieval England and the early years of cinema.

What they all have in common is the desire to watch something entertaining, whether it’s shadows on your cave wall or Lorraine. And entertainment is never just entertainment. As humans, we watch because we want to feel part of a bigger cultural experience, and we also watch because we want to feel at home with the people we care about. It’s a need for connection both to our loved ones and to a wider world, and a sense of belonging. And nothing satisfies those needs like ITV, a familiar part of British lives for seven decades.

Paul Ridsdale, ITV’s Director of Brand and Marketing, puts it another way: “‘There’s No Place Like ITV’ captures who we are at our best; a brand that connects the nation through relatable shows which reflect their lives. It showcases how entertainment has always been a powerful connector of people, bringing us together and emotionally engaging audiences. The new brand platform will sit at the heart of our 2026 plans, with early viewer testing giving us confidence that it will drive growth in both the short and long term.”

Looking at the ad’s results on our Test Your Ad platform, we can see exactly how the ad will drive that growth. The average long-term Star Rating for a television or streaming service is 2.7 Stars. ‘There’s No Place Like ITV’ flies past that with a 4.1-Star Rating, predicting strong long-term growth. We can see that the main drivers of the positive response were people feeling Uplifted, Excited and Amused – reflected in the comments which mentioned the enormous variety of programmes ITV produces.

The ad’s mix of emotions and strong branding also gave it an exceptional result on our short-term Spike Rating: we predict it will do an excellent job of reminding people about ITV’s range and the dynamic entertainment they can access at the press of a button.

ITV’s new platform will extend well beyond TV, with dozens of social, display, OOH, cinema and audio ads focusing on iconic characters and shows. It’s the job of a hero ad to pull all that together into one compelling idea, though, and ‘There’s No Place Like ITV’ does that with style, setting out its stand as the home of entertainment and the best way to meet a deeply human need.