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The New Age of TV: How Scale-Ups are Growing Beyond Social
- Jul 31
- 5 min read
A recap of our breakfast discussion with our partners, Sky Media.
If your cost per acquisition on Google or Meta has been creeping up, the instinct is usually to blame the channel. A worse algorithm, pricier auctions, tougher competition. But the more uncomfortable explanation, according to the experts, is often simpler.
Those channels aren't losing effectiveness, they're running out of demand to harvest. Performance marketing is brilliant at capturing people who are already interested, but the challenge then becomes creating new interest and appetite.
Growth needs a channel built for replenishing demand and, in a room of scaling founders, we dived deep into the question of how do you build broader, more trusted brand awareness?
Rufina Lawani and Saira Raza from Sky Media joined us alongside JP Major from Squadron, to shed light on the renewed impact TV is having and why founders should be thinking about it sooner rather than later.
Sky is a much bigger toolkit than most founders realise
The biggest myth in the room was that Sky Media means a big, expensive TV ad and nothing else. In reality, Rufina shared how their business goes far beyond linear channels: Sky Atlantic, Sky Sports and co, but also partner channels like Paramount and HBO Max, streaming services like NOW TV, and - perhaps most surprisingly - Europe's largest YouTube publisher footprint, driven by properties like Sky Sports Highlights.
The entry points range from a small, niche sponsorship right through to a multi-year Premier League partnership. For founders who assume TV is binary (do it or don't), they instead presented a shelf of options in between, including on-demand-only packages and YouTube/publisher partnerships starting from a much lower budget than you'd expect.
Go broad before you go narrow
One of the most repeated pieces of advice from JP was counterintuitive to founders used to hyper-targeting on Meta and Google: Start broad.
If you go too narrow too early, you don't gather enough data to actually learn what's working - which days, which genres, which day-parts are driving your website traffic and sales. Founders often arrive with a fixed idea of who their customer is, but that idea has usually been shaped by where they've already been advertising and social media can skew the picture. Going into a broader medium like TV, you frequently discover your real audience looks different, and behaves differently, than you may have assumed.
A four-week burst with enough spend to have national reach (roughly 20% coverage, or 10 million+ viewers) across a wide spread of channels and genres helps you understand what's actually working. You can then scale that spend down to a much more efficient, informed level and keep running it. Lower-budget entry points exist too but the caveat is that learnings are shallower the smaller you go.
Off-peak can outperform peak because of mindset
A genuinely surprising insight is that peak-time TV slots are more expensive and can often be less effective for driving direct response, because viewers in peak are in a relaxed, "lean-back" mindset. Off-peak viewers are more likely to act - pick up their phone, search your brand, convert - making off-peak airtime both cheaper (think £3-5 CPC) and, for performance-driven campaigns, more productive.
For founders looking to break out onto TV, don't assume the most expensive slot is the best slot. It depends entirely on what you're trying to achieve.
TV's real payoff shows up over months, not days
Sky's standard attribution window captures impact within roughly 14 days of a household seeing your ad, but this only tells around 40% of the story. The fuller effect of a TV campaign plays out over a three-to-six-month window, and its ‘residual’ impact, which includes brand awareness and search behaviour lifted by the campaign, can continue for up to a year.
That has a practical implication for how founders should set up measurement. Don't judge a TV campaign purely on a two-week web attribution snapshot. Build in longer measurement windows, and expect a compounding effect. Each time you come back on air, you're building from a higher base of existing awareness.
TV doesn't compete with your digital spend - it makes it work harder
Perhaps the most important reframe of the morning is understanding that TV isn't a replacement for performance marketing, it's what replenishes the pool that performance marketing then harvests. Google and Meta costs tend to creep up over time precisely because those channels are working an increasingly small, ‘warm’ pool of existing demand but they're not necessarily creating new customers, just capturing intent that already exists.
The team pointed to research from Group M spanning thousands of studies, which found TV generates a 20-30% halo effect across other channels. Search becomes cheaper and more effective, and social performs better because more people already recognise and trust the brand.
Founders in the room shared their own experience of this exact pattern: Killing spend on one channel and watching performance dip elsewhere, even when nothing else changed.
Trust is a growth lever, not just a branding nicety
Several founders in the room mentioned a core focus for them is trying to make moves into new retail listings, like Ocado, Tesco and Boots. TV credibility genuinely opens those doors.
Retail buyers, investors and even future employees respond to the signal that yours is a serious, established business, which is something that digital-only brands often struggle to send. One case study shared was Lebara, the mobile network, which grew from 500,000 to 4 million customers through sustained TV investment - not just through direct response, but through the compounding effect on retention, hiring, investment appeal, and eventual brand valuation.
B2B founders shouldn't rule TV out either
Does any of this apply if you're B2B? The answer is yes, with a slight shift. B2B buying decisions are rarely made by one person in isolation; they're influenced by colleagues, business partners, and internal networks. Broadcast media builds awareness across that whole web of influence, not just the named decision-maker, and can be addressed and targeted at a company or sector level using Sky's data partnerships if a more hyper-targeted approach is needed.
So, when?
The closing piece of advice from our speakers was don't wait until your digital channels show diminishing returns to start thinking about above-the-line media. By the time CAC is visibly climbing, you're planning under pressure - from your board, your investors, yourself. Start the conversation while digital is still working well, and use TV to build the base that keeps it working.
And a practical note for anyone about to brief a creative agency:
Talk to your media partner before you lock in a creative idea. Media constraints (like which slots and formats will actually perform) should shape the creative brief, not the other way around.
This event is part of our ongoing programme of private breakfasts with Sky Media, designed to give scaling founders access to honest, practical conversations about alternative marketing channels to drive meaningful growth.
TFN Members can find out more about their opportunities through this dedicated site.
