Direct response television (DRTV) has changed more in the past five years than in the previous twenty. To help navigate this changing service, let’s look at what DRTV is today, why it works, and how to plan and buy it well.
For many, the term still conjures a late-night ad with a phone number in the corner of the screen and a voice urging you to call now (at least this is what I remember). That picture is more than a decade out of date, and it quietly costs the brands that dismiss the medium on the strength of it. It is vital, in this service more than many, to ensure that you have kept up with the developments.
DRTV, or direct response television, is television advertising designed to prompt an immediate, measurable action rather than simply build awareness over time. For most of its history that action was a phone call, which is why the phone number became the format’s defining image, and why DRTV was long treated as the cheaper, more tactical end of TV. It was generally bought on lower-cost airtime and judged on the calls it generated. This view is now completely outdated.
The discipline behind it has not changed, but almost everything around it has. The phone number has gone (in most cases) and the response has moved to wherever customers now act. Be it a search, website visit, app download, or QR code engagement, the intent is identical and, crucially, every one of those destinations can be tracked. That single shift is what separates modern DRTV from the version still lodged in most people’s memories. It is no longer brand advertising with a website tacked on the end; it is a genuine response channel, built to drive action and measured on whether it does.
It helps to see where television sits today, because the headline story that TV is fading is only half of the picture. Linear TV viewing is indeed falling, but the conclusion usually drawn from that, that TV matters less to advertisers, does not hold up when you review the wider picture.
Total TV investment in the UK reached £5.22 billion in 2025, and has held around that level since. What has changed is the definition of television rather than its value. It is no longer a single linear spot in the middle of the day; it spans linear, broadcaster video-on-demand (BVOD), ad-supported streaming and connected TV. One medium reached through many doors. Taken together, it still reached 87.8% of UK adults every week in 2025. Even among 16-34’s, the audience most often written off as unreachable, video-on-demand now accounts for around 76.9% of their TV viewing.
The clearest signal is where the industry is placing its own money. In July 2026, Sky agreed to acquire ITV’s media and entertainment business for up to £1.6 billion, a deal subject to regulatory approval and expected to complete around 2027. Weeks earlier, Channel 4, ITV and Sky launched Universal Ads in the UK. This is a shared, self-service platform that, for the first time, lets a single campaign run across all three broadcasters’ sales houses. Whatever else these moves represent, they are not the behaviour of an industry that believes its medium is finished.
They also reflect how far the barrier to entry has fallen. Television is no longer the preserve of brands with very large budgets: a company can start regionally, or through BVOD and addressable inventory, for a relatively modest outlay, and scale as results come in. Reaching a thousand adults with a thirty-second spot costs in the region of £7.30 — a little under a penny a person which makes premium, brand-safe video far more affordable than most assume.
The result is a broader base of advertisers than ever. In 2024, 932 businesses either advertised on television for the first time or returned after five or more years away, up from 791 the year before thanks, in part, to the lower entry costs and new opportunities on offer.
Much of the hesitation around television comes back to one assumption: that a brand has to choose between building its brand and driving performance. The two are usually set in opposition, brand as slow, emotional and hard to measure against performance as fast, rational and accountable. TV is traditionally filed under the first, which is why it is protected in the good years and cut first in the lean ones.
The data tells a different story however, that the polarised opposition was never quite real. Thinkbox’s Profit Ability 2 study, an econometric analysis of £1.8 billion of media spend across 141 brands, found that television generates 54.7% of all the profit produced by advertising, at an average return of £5.61 for every pound invested. That is the long-term figure, roughly where you would expect a “brand” medium to perform. The more interesting point is what happens in the short term. Even there, supposedly the home ground of performance media, only paid search delivers more immediate profit than television; it can outperform paid social benchmarks, and it comfortably outperforms online video, which returns £3.86 against television’s £5.61.
DRTV is therefore the discipline that sets out to capture both from the same pound: the immediate response and the longer-term equity. That is its real advantage, not that it is a cheaper form of television, but that it makes television pay back quickly while continuing to also pay back over time.
One of the biggest changes to DRTV has been addressability, the ability to serve different ads to different households watching the same programme. Sky AdSmart alone can reach roughly 40% of UK homes, around thirty million people, targeted by factors such as location, life stage and affluence. In one recent case, a brand using addressable television to drive response lifted its branded search by 40% year on year and returned eight and a half times its media spend.
For advertisers who would once have ruled television out for being too broad, too expensive or too hard to measure, addressable DRTV changes the calculation. It pairs the reach and trust of TV with a level of targeting much closer to digital, and it lets brands start small and prove the response before they scale.
That flexibility is why DRTV now suits a far wider range of brands than it once did, from online and direct-to-consumer businesses that live by measurable response, to established names in considered-purchase categories such as finance, travel, retail and automotive, where the combination of broad reach and genuine accountability is hard to find anywhere else.
Getting DRTV to perform is less about the medium than about how it is run, and this is where campaigns are made or lost. At BBJ&K, we build our DRTV planning and buying around four connected stages that feed into one another rather than running in a straight line.
Most TV planning is optimised for coverage how many people, how often, how cheaply. It is far more effective to work back from the action the audience needs to take and build the schedule from there. That decision shapes the dayparts, channels and programmes you choose, and how you balance broad, mass-reach linear against precisely targeted addressable. A reach plan and a response plan can cost exactly the same and perform very differently.
Airtime is bought in a live market, and the gap between a strong buy and a weak one is real. Often twenty or thirty per cent on the same spots. We ensure we are paying for the airtime that drives action rather than the airtime that is merely cheap. Cheap airtime that does not convert is the most expensive of all.
This is where a good deal of TV activity quietly comes unstuck. Response is best tracked at spot level. Tying searches, site visits and conversions back to the individual airings that drove them and it matters to separate the demand a campaign genuinely caused from the sales that would have happened anyway. Observation and attribution are not the same thing.
A DRTV campaign is not something you set running and leave alone. The measurement should feed back into the buying as it goes shifting weight towards the creative, channels, dayparts and regions that are working, and away from those that are not. A campaign that finishes the month spending quite differently from how it began has not gone wrong; it has been actively managed.
DRTV in 2026 bears little resemblance to older advert the name still evokes. It is a measurable, accountable channel that drives an immediate, trackable response, builds the brand over the longer term, and through addressability and on-demand is now open to advertisers of almost any size. The brands that get the most from it are simply the ones that stopped judging the medium by its reputation and started judging it by its results.
If you are weighing up DRTV for your brand or wondering whether your current television activity is working as hard as it could, it is worth a conversation so please get in touch.
Written by: Michael Dupree
Sources: Thinkbox (“Profit Ability 2”; 2024–25 revenue, reach and cost data; “TV Playbook for online businesses” / Magic Numbers); GroupM (“TV Response: new rules, new roles”, analysis of 1.38m TV spots); Sky Media (AdSmart); The Drum (addressable case study, 2025); Comcast / Channel 4 / ITV / Sky (Universal Ads launch and Sky–ITV acquisition, 2026). Figures current as at 2026.
