ITV to step up marketing spend by £15m in 2024
The broadcaster claims marketing is acting as a key tool to drive growth for the ITVX streaming platform, which grew total views by over a quarter last year.
Broadcaster ITV is investing an additional £15m in marketing in 2024, describing it as a vital tool for attracting viewers to streaming platform ITVX.
ITVX saw its monthly active users increase by 19% in 2023, with total streaming hours up 26%. This helped drive 19% growth in digital revenues to £490m.
The streaming platform was launched by ITV at the end of 2022 and has been focused on driving awareness, consideration and viewership through its marketing strategy.
The broadcaster reported “strong” growth for awareness of ITVX among light viewers and adults generally, citing its campaigns as a contributor to the growth in monthly average users and streaming hours.
Going into next year, the broadcaster will step up its investment in marketing as it targets continued growth for ITVX. In 2023, ITVX drew 12.3 million viewers, up from 10.5 million the year prior. The broadcaster is targeting 20 million monthly active users on the streaming platform by 2026.
“Marketing is an important tool to continue to attract users and viewing on ITVX, and also on our linear TV channels,” the business wrote today (7 March) in its annual results statement.
The broadcaster said it would pursue a more “responsive” approach to its marketing to ensure it is highlighting popular programmes to the most valuable audiences.
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The additional investment will see ITV step up its data capabilities, increase the prominence of its content on third-party sites and run campaigns to engage more 25-to-54 year-old light viewers who are “highly valuable” to advertisers.
ITV has said it will also continue to focus on the measurement and optimisation of its marketing in 2024 in line with the increased investment.
This time last year, ITV predicted declining ad revenue in 2023 as advertisers continue to shift revenue to digital channels. Indeed, linear advertising revenues declined by 15% in the year. On the other hand, digital advertising revenue grew 21%.
The broadcaster also saw a successful year for its production house ITV Studios. The team produced Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, which was ITV’s biggest new drama in over a decade, as well as Squid Game: The Challenge and Fool Me Once, which both performed extremely well on Netflix.
ITV Studios notched up £2.17bn in revenue in 2023, up 4% on the year prior.
“This growth in production and streaming substantially offset the challenging linear TV advertising market conditions,” explained ITV CEO Carolyn McCall.
ITV as a whole did, however, see its revenue decline 2% to £3.63bn. The company’s profit, or EBITDA, was also down by almost a third (32%) to £489m, impacted in part by “the challenging advertising market”.
