Should your scale-up advertise on TV? How to test broadcast media without a big-brand budget
- Laura Derbyshire
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
For most scale-up founders, TV advertising feels like a different planet. It is what Coca-Cola does. It is what you aspire to, eventually, when you have made it. Right now you are running Meta ads, investing in search, maybe dipping into podcasts - and TV sits somewhere in the "one day" folder.
Here is what we hear from founders all the time:
"We know we need to build the brand, but we cannot afford TV."
The truth is, you probably can. And more importantly, you can test it before committing - regionally, affordably, with real data on whether it works for your business. We have done this with OSER clients. And the results speak for themselves.
How IRIS Audio went from product-led to market-ready - and sold out
IRIS Audio is a technology company innovating in spatial and immersive audio - building hardware and software that changes how sound is experienced. The product was excellent. But the brand story and strategic framing were not yet where they needed to be to unlock growth.
OSER partnered with the IRIS Audio leadership team to define a strategic foundation, then built a fully integrated launch campaign: a global TV and digital rollout, created with Hot Icarus on creative and 23rdC on production, running on Sky.
The campaign ran as 30-second and 10-second TV stings on Sky, extended into VOD, digital OOH, digital content, reels and stills - all shot in a single production to maximise cost-efficiency. One creative platform. One shoot. One joined-up story across every channel.
The result: IRIS Audio headphones sold out. And the brand momentum directly supported a £5.6m Puma Private Equity funding round.
This is exactly what is possible when a scale-up approaches TV and media the right way - not as a vanity project, but as a properly planned, cost-efficient growth lever with a clear creative strategy and measurable outcomes.
Read the full IRIS Audio case study here.
Why TV still matters - especially for brand building
Performance marketing is brilliant at capturing demand. But it does not create it. When your CAC starts creeping up and your ROAS starts softening, that is often not a targeting problem or a creative problem - it is a brand problem. You are running out of people who already know you.
TV builds brand. It creates the mental availability that makes your performance marketing work harder. The IPA long-term effectiveness data is unambiguous: brands that invest in broad-reach media alongside performance marketing consistently outperform those that do not.
The question is not whether TV works. It is whether the economics can work for a scale-up. And increasingly, they can.
The regional testing opportunity: what is actually available now
The landscape for accessible TV advertising has changed significantly in the last few years. Here is what is worth knowing:
Sky AdSmart
Sky AdSmart is arguably the biggest unlock for scale-up brands. Instead of buying a national TV spot, you buy addressable TV - your ad appears in specific households based on location, demographics, and interest data. Campaigns run from around £3,000, you can target specific postcodes or regions, and track performance properly. For a scale-up wanting to test a new market or validate creative before a bigger spend, it is genuinely transformative.
ITV regional
ITV still sells regional airtime - meaning you can buy Glasgow, the Midlands, or Yorkshire without buying the whole country. If you have a strong regional heartland or you are launching into a specific geography, regional ITV lets you test broadcast TV at a fraction of national rates. It reaches a broader, older demographic that is harder to find on digital.
Caasie - programmatic outdoor
Cassie programmatic outdoor is worth mentioning alongside TV - because the smartest brand-building campaigns combine the two. Cassie lets you buy digital outdoor screens programmatically by location, daypart, and audience. Run coordinated TV and OOH in a test region for a few weeks, see what moves, and scale what works. For IRIS Audio, the integration of TV and digital OOH into one creative suite meant the cost per asset was a fraction of what separate briefs would have cost.
Connected TV and audio - IRIS
Connected TV - streaming platforms with ads - is growing fast and increasingly accessible. IRIS.TV contextual targeting lets you place ads in relevant streaming content without the cookie-based targeting limitations that are squeezing digital budgets. If your audience is cord-cutting and streaming, this is where they are watching. Entry points are lower than traditional broadcast and measurement has improved significantly.
The secret to cost-efficient TV: one creative platform, every channel
The biggest mistake scale-ups make with TV is treating it as a standalone channel. They brief a TV ad, shoot it, and then separately brief their social team, their OOH agency, their digital team. Each brief generates its own production cost. The creative rarely hangs together.
The smarter approach - and the one we used for IRIS Audio - is to build one creative platform and one production that serves every channel simultaneously. A single shoot produces 30 second and 10 second TV edits, VOD versions, digital content, reels, stills for OOH and social. The creative looks and feels joined-up because it is. And the cost per asset drops dramatically.
This kind of thinking - effectiveness and efficiency combined - is what separates a well-planned scale-up campaign from an expensive experiment.
How to structure a TV test that gives you real data
A test does not mean a small version of what a big brand does. It means a properly designed experiment with a clear hypothesis, a control, and metrics you can read.
Pick one region, one objective. Do not try to test brand awareness and sales in one campaign. Pick one clear objective - usually brand recall or direct response - and design the campaign around that.
Run for at least four weeks. TV needs time to work. A two-week burst tells you almost nothing. Four to six weeks gives you enough frequency to measure genuine lift.
Use a matched market control. Pick a comparable region where you are NOT running TV. Measure the difference in web traffic, branded search, and sales between test and control. This is the cleanest way to isolate TV effect.
Brief for TV, not digital. The biggest mistake is repurposing a social video for TV. TV creative needs to work in 20 or 30 seconds, in a lean-back context, without sound-off assumptions. Brief it properly from the start - then extend it across every other channel from there.
Plan for the halo. TV almost always lifts your other channels. Watch your paid search CTR, organic traffic, and social engagement during and after the campaign period. TV impact is rarely confined to TV alone.
What does a regional TV test actually cost?
A genuine regional test - AdSmart or ITV regional, four to six weeks, with proper creative - can be structured from as little as £50,000 all-in, including production. That is not nothing. But for a scale-up with a meaningful marketing budget, it is a testable number.
The question is not "can we afford to test TV?" It is "can we afford not to find out whether TV would work for us?"
How OSER approaches campaign planning for scale-ups
Between us we bring 40 years of brand, strategy and effectiveness experience - including campaigns recognised for their business results by Marketing Society, Effie UK and Marketing Week. Diego Chicharro, our Head of Strategy, was most recently Head of Effectiveness at Publicis London and is a leading voice in brand effectiveness in the industry.
What we do differently at OSER is apply that same rigour to scale-up budgets and timelines.
We help you choose the right channels for your stage, design the test properly, brief creative partners, and ensure your creative platform works as hard as possible across every channel. If you are curious whether TV could be the next lever for your business, the first step is understanding where your brand is right now - find out here.
Key takeaways
TV advertising is accessible for scale-ups. Sky AdSmart regional testing starts from around £3,000.
Performance marketing captures demand. TV creates it. The two work best together.
One creative platform, one shoot, every channel. That is how you make TV cost-efficient at scale-up budgets.
A properly designed regional test - four to six weeks, matched market control - gives you real data to make decisions from.
IRIS Audio used this approach to sell out their headphones and secure a £5.6m PE funding round. It is not a one-day ambition - it is a now opportunity.
