Last year Channel 4 announced its aim to become the first ‘public service streamer’, with an ambitious plan to reorganise the business for a digital-first future. The broadcaster had already begun shifting its focus from traditional broadcasting to digital through its Future4 strategy, launched in 2020. With its new Fast Forward strategy, Channel 4 has pledged to further prioritise its digital output, diversify its revenue streams, and reshape its operations.
The broadcaster has a new commercial chief tasked with taking this vision to the advertising market too. Rak Patel, who started in the role last month, joined from Spotify, bringing with him plenty of experience in the digital advertising world. Speaking with VideoWeek, Patel said he had previously admired Channel 4’s sales team from afar, frequently seeing the broadcaster winning awards and getting recognition for their work. And though he’s only been in the company himself for less than a month now, his early impressions have given him plenty of confidence that TV “absolutely works”, and still offers unique value to advertisers which can’t be found elsewhere.
The key, Patel said, is to hold on to these strengths as Channel 4 continues to merge its digital and linear operations, bringing together the best of both worlds. VideoWeek spoke with executives working across the broadcaster to hear more about how its offering is evolving in 2025.
Broadening social circles
As part of its digital push, Channel 4 has been one of Europe’s most proactive broadcasters in terms of distributing content via social platforms.
YouTube has been a big part of this strategy. In 2022, Channel 4 agreed a deal with the tech giant to distribute and monetise 1,000 hours of its hit TV shows on the platform. The broadcaster also launched Channel 4.0, a digital-first brand which hosts made-for-social content on YouTube and across other social platforms.
Broadcasters are often cautious in their approach to social platforms, with which they compete for both audiences’ attentions and advertisers’ ad spend. And social platforms differ significantly in the level of control over monetisation which they give professional media partners, meaning some are easier to work with than others. But Patel said that Channel 4 is determined to “follow the eyeballs”, meeting viewers where they are and delivering them content to platforms its audiences are engaging with.
The is delivering in terms of viewership. The company announced last week that audiences for full episodes of its TV shows were up by 169 percent year-on-year in 2024, while total views across its social output grew by 5.5 percent.
Fatima Dowlet, Channel 4 Sales’s head of streaming and social propositions, said one focus on the social front is speaking more with social teams within agencies. Social teams typically sit separately from broader digital video and TV teams. But they hold budgets which Channel 4’s made-for-social content should compete for, so it’s important for the broadcaster that it’s able to break into those teams.
In the long term, Dowlett said the dream would be for brands and agencies to bring their budgets to Channel 4 and buy across all of its inventory — linear, streaming and social. For the time being though, Channel 4 has to work through the fragmentation in how agencies buy, as well as in how inventory is bought and measured across social platforms.
Streaming refresh
Channel 4’s own streaming platform has obviously been a major focus of its digital push as well, and it’s continuing to invest in evolving the platform while adding on new tools and capabilities for advertisers.
The broadcaster this week announced a few new targeting capabilities, including targeting based on drive times from selected postcodes, and the live launch of its data partnership with Boots, which will enable advertisers to match Boots’ loyalty card customer data with Channel 4’s registered streaming users.
There’s broader change on the horizon too. Channel 4 has announced a tech overhaul over the next year, which it describes as a relaunch of its streaming property for advertisers and viewers through a new technology approach.
Grace Boswood, Channel 4’s director of technology, said there will be two elements to this overhaul. The first is essentially to reimagine the core technology behind the streaming service to ensure it’s fit for Channel 4’s future as a public service streamer. This involves asking what the core elements are which viewers and advertisers need from the platform, and then ensuring they’re delivered in a simple, easy-to-use way.
The second part is building new, innovative capabilities on top of this core infrastructure, and Boswood said a big focus will be on data and personalisation. The goal is for all viewers to get a TV-like experience on Channel 4’s streaming service, but for this experience to be tailored to each individual user.
The broadcaster is experimenting to figure out how exactly that personalisation might manifest. But Boswood picked out ad breaks as one potentially fruitful area. Alongside targeting of the ads themselves, Channel 4 is looking at tailoring where within a programme each ad break is played, and how many ads run within each ad break.
Amid this refresh, the company is considering the role of AI, both on the creative front, and in terms of increasing productivity within its own operations.
Charlie Glyn, ad technology leader at Channel 4 Sales, said the company’s role as a public service broadcaster (/streamer) means it has a particularly high responsibility to take an ethical approach, and set benchmarks for the industry in terms of how and when AI should be used. It’s exploring, for example, AI-based ad creation tools, but wants to be sure that the benefits of such a tool outweigh any costs, and that it brings real value to Channel 4’s customers.
There’s plenty of potential value however in less flashy AI-driven tools. Barry John, Channel 4 Sales’s head of sales operations, gave an example for buyers wanting to target by programme. Instead of buyers being given a list of programmes to browse through, a buyer could use a prompt in a generative AI tool to surface relevant shows and products for their campaign.
New accessibility and sustainability initiatives
Another big focus for Channel 4 in the next few years is continuing to expand the accessibility of advertising run on its platforms, while also investing in sustainability solutions.
The broadcaster had a major push on accessibility during last year’s Paralympic Games, aiming for 100 percent of ads during Paralympics broadcasts to have closed-caption subtitles enabled. Channel 4 quickly ran into barriers — getting all the required parties on board at speed proved difficult — but it did manage to deliver closed-caption subtitles on 60 percent of ads.
Now Amy Jenkins, customer and commercial leader at Channel 4 Sales, says the broadcaster is aiming to deliver closed captions for 60 percent of all ad campaigns on big-screen streaming. Again, alongside the significant amount of technical work required, reaching this target will require brand partners to embrace the push as well. The work around the Paralympics highlighted a lack of understanding in the industry around the costs and the ease with which closed-caption subtitles can be enabled for advertisers, which slowed down adoption.
On the sustainability front, Channel 4 intends to spin up a couple of new initiatives. One is the launch of an exclusive competition for certified B Corporations, where the prize will be £120,000 worth of ad inventory each for five winners. The aim is to champion these businesses, while also highlighting the role TV can play in raising awareness and challenging misconceptions for these sorts of brands. Channel 4 has run similar competitions in the past, including its Black in Business initiative which awards airtime to Black-owned businesses.
The company also intends to launch a new carbon emissions measurement tool for advertisers. This tool, which Channel 4 says would be a first for a UK broadcaster, will show advertisers the emissions generated by their streaming campaigns, helping them understand their carbon footprint and optimise accordingly. Ewan Douglas, Channel 4 Sales’s head of sales for nations and regions, said he hopes that this tool could be a first step towards a “singular voice” for carbon measurement across the broadcasting industry.
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