As upfronts wrap up, British marketers foresee a flurry of innovation in retail media and CTV

British marketers may not experience the glitz and glamour that their American counterparts do during the annual upfronts and NewFronts, but the IAB U.K.’s Digital Upfronts still offered them plenty to applaud as they wrapped up last week.

Like the NewFronts hosted in the spring by IAB in the U.S., the U.K.’s Digital Upfronts have become a key event series for digital marketers to keep up with new ad inventory, successful competitor campaigns and ad tech innovations.

The roster of big-name presenters included The Sun newspaper, Sky Media and supermarket giant Tesco. But marketers also heard from retail media, audio and gaming firms, in addition to other streamers.

The Current was on-site to unpack the industry’s biggest trends, innovations and successes as British marketers prepared their 2025 media plans.

Retail media takes over Britain

The British retail media space is on a roll. During the upfronts, James Chandler, CMO at IAB U.K., said the country’s yearly retail media ad spend is projected to surpass 1 billion pounds next year, not including Amazon, up 42% from this year.

And it’s paying off for brands too. Thanks to its investment in retail media, the kefir yogurt brand Biotiful grew its customer base by 50%, as founder Natasha Bowes told her audience. Scouring shopper insights, Bowes found that shoppers “couldn’t quite connect taste to healthy fermented foods” like kefir — a fermented milk drink that’s increasingly popular in the U.K. This prompted Biotiful to offer a money-back guarantee for consumers unsure about trying the product. “Consumer data is extremely important to understand the barriers to penetration,” she said.

Some retailers took the opportunity to entice the advertisers and agencies in the crowd by highlighting product innovations. Tesco focused on the predictive audiences available via its dunnhumby Sphere platform, designed to help advertisers predict and prevent customer churn. Uber teased upcoming formats like augmented-reality ads, pre-checkout inventory, and a “first impression” format that appears when users first open the app. And online-only grocer Ocado showcased its newly launched media network.

Still, as the number of retail media networks worldwide pushes past 200 and online retail media environments saturate, some industry players want to convince advertisers to look in-store.

“We think the unsung hero is in-store,” said Emma Dean, COO at retail media agency SMG. She shared new SMG research showing that advertisers achieved 37% greater brand uplift per store when they included digital ad units, such as screens, versus when they didn’t. “If we can get that in-store element right, it makes every other channel more effective,” Dean added.   

Connected TV content face-off

As retailers vied to differentiate their offerings in front of media buyers, streaming and entertainment companies talked up their upcoming content while emphasizing the value of their audiences.

Alex Hodge, senior director of digital ad sales and innovation at Warner Bros. Discovery U.K. and Ireland, said the company was busy bringing insights collected from consumption across its content portfolio into one data product. Hodge also pushed Warner Bros. Discovery’s sports offering via TNT Sports in the U.K., emphasizing the “2,400 hours” of live sports content it will show before the end of the year, such as the Autumn Nations rugby competition.

Sky, meanwhile, focused on its film and TV offerings, even though it owns the rights to stream the majority of Premier League football games in the U.K. “The best content produces the best results,” said Dan Cohen, director of product and innovation at Sky Media, as he showed off a new TV series, The Day of the Jackal, starring Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne.

Cohen also doubled down on Sky’s commitments to make its inventory more broadly available to advertisers, such as by working with free ad-supported television channels and original equipment manufacturers like Samsung, while also making more of it available programmatically. “We need to make inventory available to you in the way you want to buy, not by forcing the old ways,” he said.

Podcasts grow, but shifts are on the horizon

U.K. podcast listeners are predicted to grow around 3% every year until 2028, when they are projected to make up 30.9% of Britons. As the market approaches saturation, advertisers and media owners alike are getting creative as they jostle for listeners’ attention.

Bauer Media Group — a European entertainment network that owns publishing and broadcast companies — brought on celebrity radio hosts Jordan Banjo and Perri Kiely to showcase their on-air chemistry as a major selling point. “You are looking for that bit of company,” said Banjo, referring to why people may listen to talk shows, including their own morning show on the Kiss radio channel.

Global, the U.K. and Europe’s largest radio and outdoor media company, instead showcased an Olympic Games case study with the National Lottery — which sponsors Team GB — to highlight the importance of authenticity in audio partnerships.

Podcast production company Novel immersed the audience in some of its sound-design capabilities, such as sonic branding and sonic logos. “However you define your brand, we can translate that into sound,” said Alice Beverton-Palmer, commercial creative partnerships director at Novel.

Still, people seemed to skirt around the elephant in the room: programmatic audio ads. Spotify is testing its own ad exchange, in a bid to capture ad demand from smaller advertisers and enable more efficient spending for bigger brands. While the focus is on North America for now, British audio media owners could be in for formidable competition in the future.

As Amir Rasekh, managing director at Nectar360, the retail media arm of British retailer Sainsbury’s, put it: “The customer journey is no longer linear, it is squiggly.” With 2025 only two months away, British marketers can count on a flurry of new inventory, innovations and inspiration to help craft media plans for an ever more fragmented media landscape.