Channel 4’s Fatima Dowlet: “Linear is still doing great numbers”

The UK’s Channel 4, like other broadcasters, was hit last year by an exceptionally tough downturn in the advertising market, suffering a drop of 10% in overall ad revenue.

Despite its market-related travails, the ad-funded public broadcaster has been at the forefront of the pivot to digital. Digital revenues rose by 10% over the same period to take a 27% share of the total, and the company now expects to reach its 2025 target of making 30% of its revenues from digital advertising a year ahead of schedule.

Yet despite digital’s growing share of the pie, Fatima Dowlet, Channel 4’s Head of Streaming and Social Propositions, believes that the much-vaunted pivot to digital can be overstated.

“I don’t think we’re quite at a tipping point with the decline in linear,” she cautions. “Linear is still doing great numbers and is still by far the biggest advertising medium to achieve mass simultaneous reach.”

She is also keen to point out the differences between a public broadcaster such as Channel 4, which is rooted in the UK with a mission to inform, entertain and support the local content creation ecosystem, and global streamers whose content is to an extent algorithmically driven.

Dowlet says that advertisers “know that TV works”, with data that backs up their confidence in the medium.

Digital advertising – meaning advertising associated with video-on-demand and live streaming services – is nevertheless growing fast as linear declines.

While Dowlet admits that question marks still hang over how effective digital advertising is at delivering value, she points out some clear advantages over traditional linear broadcasting.

“You’ve got the ability to be much more niche in your targeting, which you can’t do with linear TV, and find audiences that you previously wouldn’t have been able to find,” she says.

Channel 4 now has the ability, via its product suite, to match first-party data with that of customers, enabling the latter to attribute outcomes such as purchases to prior exposure to advertising. Any relevant action within 30 days of the IP address being exposed to an ad will be attributed to the ad and a report provided shortly thereafter. The broadcaster has already implemented this with customers including Nectar – the loyalty card programme of supermarket chain Sainsbury’s – and rival supermarket giant Tesco, with a launch forthcoming with high street pharmacy chain Boots’ Advantage loyalty card programme.

“If there’s an action, that is tracked and you can see if there was an actual purchase, or a brochure downloaded, or a website visited. We are matching first-party data with that of the retailers. So, we can say we know you are a Sainsbury’s customer, and we know you’ve bought something because you logged in or used your Nectar card,” she says.

Channel 4 and its advertising client can correlate that purchase with exposure to an ad, using a control group to test for purchasing decisions among people who don’t see the ads.

The ability to correlate a decision to buy an advert with a consumer’s decision to purchase the advertised good or service is clearly very powerful, but it comes at a price.

The inventory is sold at a premium, says Dowlet, partly because there are additional costs in delivering this level of insight into purchasing. All this activity is anonymised and those who manage the data warehouses that enable the service need to be paid. However, she says, clients see the value and are willing to pay more for it.

Project Lantern

“Ultimately, we all want to protect the broadcast industry and how important it is to viewers” Fatima Dowlet, Channel 4]

To maximise the value of advertising, the UK’s principal commercial broadcasters – ITV, Channel 4 and Sky – collaborate extensively, notably through Caria, their joint booking system. Most recently, the trio announced Project Lantern, their joint measurement panel to track the short-term impact of TV advertising on sales, providing the kind of purchase feedback described by Dowlet above, but in this case for linear TV.

Lantern, unveiled in full in September 2024, provides for a joint TV measurement panel to demonstrate the impact of advertising both on brand-building over the long term and on the link between advertising and search, queries, social media engagement and purchasing.

“That’s all about how we can look at and measure outcomes from a linear perspective across broadcasters,” says Dowlet. “Eventually it will move across into streaming and VOD as well. We are much stronger together. It’s important that we all sing from the same hymn sheet. We all want to work together and deliver on the same objectives because ultimately, we all want to protect the broadcast industry and how important it is to viewers.”

Collaboration to defend the position of broadcasting is becoming more important than ever as younger audiences migrate to social media and YouTube for their video fix.

“We’re cognisant of the fact that our viewers – and the next generation especially – are using YouTube as a discovery platform and not coming to apps like Channel 4’s or probably even Netflix or Disney. We’ve got to be where our viewers are, so we’ve got to put our content on YouTube,” says Dowlet, who has management responsibility for a unit specially set up to monetise the YouTube ad inventory around Channel 4 content. She admits that Channel 4’s options remain limited here, however, because it is another company’s platform.

“YouTube is also relatively new to allowing third parties to sell their inventory, so they’re learning as well, but it has been successful, and it hasn’t massively impacted our current streaming proposition,” she adds.

Integrated campaigns and programmatic ads

“Whichever way a customer wants to buy advertising from us, they’re going to find it a lot easier” Fatima Dowlet, Channel 4

Dowlet is clear that linear remains at the core of Channel 4’s commercial proposition, and that means that the broadcaster needs to offer integrated campaigns that span its linear and digital offerings. She admits that this is challenging.

“It’s still difficult. You’ve got legacy systems that don’t always talk to each other. However, we’ve obviously got CFlight now, which looks, post-campaign at what your reach was,” she says, referencing the joint venture between Sky Media, ITV Media and Channel 4 sales arm 4 Sales that established a unified TV advertising metric across live, time-shifted and on-demand TV to measure impressions and reach across different devices.

However, Dowlet admits there is still work to do to provide a unified view across linear and streaming.

Ultimately advertisers want not only to receive information on how many impressions an ad delivered and what the frequency and reach of an ad was, but about attribution, or purchasing decisions.

Channel 4 is also leaning into programmatic advertising to maximise the value of its inventory. Dowlet says that the next step for the broadcaster is the launch of a new enhanced private marketplace, which will cater to “a new and burgeoning group of customers”. She says that the marketplace, which will be open to all brands, agencies and other businesses to use, with a particular focus on SMEs, will give much greater flexibility to advertisers who want to trigger campaigns under certain conditions. She cites the example of an advertiser of ice cream that wanted to trigger a campaign when the air temperature passed a certain threshold.

“What we want to do is democratise access so whichever way a customer wants to buy advertising from us, they’re going to find it a lot easier, whether that’s through programmatic, direct sales or even old-school picking up the phone,” she says.

Addressable ads

One of the key advantages of digital as opposed to linear broadcast advertising is the ease with which addressable advertising can be implemented.

Dowlet says Channel 4 can now offer “hundreds upon hundreds of targeting options and segments”. The company has launched Approved Transactional, an offering that allows advertisers to buy slots based on purchasing insights. It matches debit and credit card transaction data from millions of consumers against the profiles of its 30 million registered streaming users, with Channel 4 creating more than 50 new customer profiles for brands to target including travel, technology and automotive. Transaction data is supplied by Acxiom and Affinity Solutions.

Approved Transactional, along with the Attribute service, will be part of the broadcaster’s new private marketplace offering.

“There is always a balance. It’s our job to advise our customers to help them shape their campaign to achieve their KPIs. Don’t go super-niche if you are looking for broad reach, but you might stretch the campaign, with some budget to achieve reach and some for hyper-targeting,” says Dowlet.

Narrow targeting can be configured to a range of criteria. The broadcaster recently launched targeting at the level of individual postcodes, opening the TV ad market to local advertisers. However, Dowlet cautions that advertisers need to be wary of hitting the same viewers with the same ad too many times.

Overall, says Dowlet, Channel 4 is focused on proving “the efficacy and the value of digital streaming” and its ability to deliver a return on investment in advertising.

“Our customers can see the value and benefit and how it delivers incremental reach as well – that the experience more than anything is important and that people understand this is a very high-attention environment,” she says.