From Sapling to Oak: How New-to-TV Brands Can Maximise Growth with TV Advertising
“The only thing holding back new-to-TV brands is that not many people know them yet”
James Boodt
Senior Strategist, ITV
For brands looking to scale their business, advertising on TV presents a golden opportunity. However, harnessing TV’s potential for growth is much like planting a seed—it requires careful nurturing. Creative elements serve as the nutrients that enrich your campaign, while effective media planning acts as the watering and feeding that supports its development. Just as different plant varieties need tailored care, businesses require customised strategies to foster their growth. Whether they’re digital debutants or established players, brands entering existing categories or launching entirely new ones, brands must carefully consider creative development, media planning, and measurement strategies to ensure their campaigns thrive and flourish.
In a recent webinar titled “Break Through: How New and Returning Businesses Can Grow with TV,” System1 and ITV unveiled key strategies for brands looking to lay new roots for growth. The discussion covered three key areas: why brands should advertise on TV, how to balance salesmanship and showmanship, and valuable insights from those who have already taken the leap.
So, without further ado, let’s explore how you too can Break Through…
The Case for TV
As James Boodt from ITV noted during the Break Through webinar, “The only thing holding back new-to-TV brands is that not many people know them yet.” Rather than viewing this as a hurdle, brands should embrace it as an opportunity when launching on TV. A 2023 study by Thinkbox revealed that 90% of UK audiences engage with broadcast or subscription video, with adults averaging around five hours of TV daily. This positions TV as the primary channel for video advertising exposure—even among younger viewers (16-34 years old), where it accounted for 54% of their interactions with video ads.
Beyond its extensive reach, TV is a powerful business driver and the most profitable advertising channel over the long term. Linear TV alone contributes nearly half of all profit return on investment (ROI). This is supported by a study titled The Triple Opportunity of Attentionby Rob Brittain, Peter Field, Karen Nelson-Field, and Orlando Wood, which found that higher attention channels like TV enhance creative effectiveness, leading to a +65% increase in significant business outcomes, including greater attention and mental availability.
While brands might hesitate, believing these advantages apply only to larger companies with substantial budgets, TV is equally beneficial for small businesses. In fact, smaller brands often see larger sales uplifts at lower investment levels, as highlighted in the Data2Decisions/Work/Thinkbox report As Seen On TV: Supercharging Your Small Business.
It’s important to acknowledge that lower-funnel channels can be appealing for smaller brands due to their lower costs and quicker, more visible results. However, as panellist Ben Farren, Founder and CEO of Spoke menswear, pointed out, digital marketing can only take you so far. For brands looking to advance their business, increasing awareness and building brand equity through TV advertising is the way forward.
Balancing Salesmanship and Showmanship
As I mentioned earlier, launching your first TV campaign is much like nurturing a plant. While TV offers fertile ground for new-to-TV brands, it requires the right seeds and nutrients to thrive. This is where creative input becomes crucial. One major pitfall, as Ben Farren from Spoke pointed out, is that many brands—especially direct-to-consumer ones—tend to treat TV like a performance marketing channel.
Performance marketing elements, or “salesmanship” features as described by Orlando Wood, can indeed be beneficial for first-time TV campaigns. After all, if few people know your brand or product, it’s vital to communicate your message clearly. Prominent product imagery, strong calls to action, and concise messaging can effectively introduce your brand to a new audience.
Additionally, new-to-TV brands don’t have the luxury of being purely emotion-led or focused on “showmanship” in the same way that established brands can. While creative elements like characters, narrative, sense of place, and melody are effective at driving emotion, new-to-TV brands must also incorporate product cues and performance features to avoid losing out on attribution. Just like nurturing a plant, if you underwater or overwater it, you risk damaging it before it has a chance to reach the surface. The key is to strike a balance between both approaches to ensure successful growth.
To help visualise these two approaches to advertising, here’s one example of a predominantly “salesmanship” campaign and another that leans more into “showmanship.” Both can be effective in their own right, but they ultimately achieve different outcomes: the former is likely to drive immediate short-term sales, while the latter focuses on building brand equity for long-term gains.
Salesmanship
Showmanship
As brands increasingly leverage the power of TV, they can afford to rely less on performance marketing features and instead tap into emotional triggers. A prime example is Spoke, which returned to TV with a humorous campaign. While the product is consistently featured, it’s the character, narrative, and comedy that drive the story. This approach earned the campaign a 3.7-star rating, which is 1.3 stars higher than the new-to-TV average.
Want to Grow Your Business?
For brands looking to scale up their business, launching a TV campaign is an exciting opportunity. Charlotte Ford, Senior Marketing Director at Ruggable and a Break Through panellist, shared her excitement—and that of her mother—when Ruggable launched their inaugural TV campaign this summer. It’s a monumental achievement with significant payoffs when executed effectively. Fortunately, the path to success is clearer than ever, thanks to the growing body of data and research that highlights the benefits of TV and provides guidance on navigating it effectively, including insights from this report.
“There are more tools now to demonstrate the value of new channels and going on TV, or changing your approach to creative, that we should all be taking advantage of” – Charlotte Ford
Access creative, media planning, and measurement strategies for growing your business by downloading the full Break Through report from System1 and ITV.
Is Your Creative Sapling Thriving and Well-Nourished?
“One way to test success, is pre-test” – Nina Hossain
Discover whether your new-to-TV ad strikes the right balance between salesmanship and showmanship by pre-testing your campaign. System1’s Test Your Ad Platform allows brands to measure and optimise their creative at any stage of the planning cycle, including scripts and storyboards, with over 150,000 ads to benchmark against.
