How come Australian TV revenue was down 4.6% in F25 when UK TV revenue was up 3.8%? It all depends how comfortable you are in investing to win.

TV in AU: the revenue declines are getting worse.

The Guideline SMI numbers released this week made for grim reading for TV.

FY25 TV spend was down 7.6%, with video overall down 4.6%. For June 2025, TV spend was down 16.1%, with overall video down 12.7%. In the 12 months to June 30, TV was one of the worst performing mediums. Only news performed worse. For the month of June 2025, it was the same story.

To put these declines in context, if TV in 2024 was a $3.4b industry it is likely to decline in revenue anywhere between $170m and $300m for calendar year 2025. This revenue decline is not commensurate with audiences. Revenue is departing for reasons unrelated to consumer behaviour. TV has a tonne of positive stories to tell in 2025 - they are just not being heard in a way that is impacting behabiour.

YouTube's growth is unrelenting.

In the same period as these TV numbers came out, YouTube’s Q2 numbers for 2025 were released and showed a platform that is printing money.

YouTube generated $9.97 billion USD in revenue for the 3 months ending June 30, up 13% year on year. It is on track to crack $40 billion in revenues this year, with around $5b of this new money.

YouTube is trying to position as the new TV for advertisers, whilst also claiming its YouTube Shorts product is doing two hundred billion views every single day. This claim means of the 8.2 billion people in the world, every one of them on average is watching 24 YouTube Shorts videos. A benefit of being a tech company is you can make seemingly outrageous claims and they are believed.

What people watch on YouTube is really a bit of a mystery. No one really knows. We have metrics around likes and subscribes, and view starts, but these are all topline. If you are an advertiser or a content creator, you only know what you are told. For instance we were told in the Ofcom report that "half of YouTube’s top trending videos now resemble traditional TV". What that means when it comes to viewers, view time and metrics that help plan effective advertising campaigns is unknown.

BARB in the UK has an idea – as I wrote about last week – and their data suggests YouTube consumption is not like TV. But regardless, the dollars are flowing into YouTube at a blistering rate.

Australia’s TV networks have limited ideas (or limited appetite) to stop the bleed. Of the money unnecessarily migrating out of TV, a large chunk of it is going to YouTube.

The UK’s Thinkbox has not just stopped the revenue declines but returned their industry to growth.

UK TV ad spend grew by 3.8% in 2024, an incredible achievement. 3,8% gain in TV spend in 2024 was driven in a large way by Thinkbox – and it delivered to its constituents a collective 190 million pound of upside

Thinkbox understands how to communicate to the press, marketers, agencies, and the government. It is consistent in the themes it delivers – the brand suitability of TV, audiences’ relationship, and affinity with critical content like sport and reality, effectiveness driving areas such as reach immediacy and impact, and helping simplify the role TV and broader video plays in driving brand power.

My view is Thinkbox plays ‘offense’ in how it positions TV. It talks about new advertisers coming into TV, it talks about how TV can be accretive to emergent brands, it leads the way when it comes to depth and breadth of research. It acts confidently and like a leader. Thinkbox can find positive narratives that celebrate the medium and build intrigue.

Thinkbox would not be a cheap operation. It has a reputable CEO in Lindsey Clay a solid team, and it is prepared to invest in research and how it communicates. It could cost in the vicinity of 5-7m pound a year to operate. Maybe more. But its return for its stakeholders would easily be ten times that.

Thinkbox is an investment and not an expense for its stakeholders, and this is the prime difference between what is happening in the UK and how Australia is presently operating.

TV in Australia is under existential threats (still!), and it has to move on three areas.

There is only a minor difference in the underlying facts between UK TV consumption and Australian TV consumption. It is just the UK and Thinkbox are much stronger at creating the narrative and delivering it effectively than Australia is. Both markets are similar – they have a similar level of incumbents, they are under the same threats, and their main customers (marketers and agencies) are similar culturally and operationally. Both have positive stories to tell around consumption. Thinkbox has UK TV up 3.8%, Australian TV approach has spend down 4.6% for F25 and over 12% in June 2025. That is a jarring statistic and one that doesn't reflect well on the local operators ability to sell the medium.

So, what would I do to arrest this bleed, as the bleed gets worse and the current course of doing not much proves to be an ineffective strategy.

TV must sell itself in a way that is progressive and easy to comprehend: Thinkbox has demonstrated how to create a compelling pitch on the power of TV and deliver it in a way that generates sustained results. And that approach is investment, repetition, and commitment to impact the market. From events, to research, to accreditation, to training, to media outreach, to being strategic and focused in its provocation.

Make TV the easiest channel to buy.: TV is the hardest channel to buy (maybe out of home is more difficult) and whilst it has become easier to buy that it was a decade ago, let us not ignore how hard that was. What it is not is as easy to buy as the platforms, which can allow you to drop $1m in a few seconds and not worry too much about optimization or under delivery. What the financials of Google and Meta show is that ad buyers want to buy 1 or 2 suppliers, not 5+. The networks are collaborating on measurement, collaboration on a central platform is critical to deliver on (not just talk about)

Replicate Thinkbox – heck, even set up a local outpost of it and share resource and thinking with the UK: The best chance the local industry has at changing the narrative driving the reduction in TV ad spend is establishing a local arm of Thinkbox and building on their work. This would benefit Australia and the UK. It would provide both with more resource. Give it a local CEO but connect closely to the UK business and work collaboratively on research, events, accreditation, training etc.

The one thing that is critical is this cannot be half baked. Invest the funds on the hypothesis this body can bring TV back to growth. Spend the $5-10m AUD a year to make it fly and generate 50-100m in new revenue. Do not cheap out and make it a 2–3-person operation with no resource that has to beg to a board for any financial help to change the narrative.

The alternative is to keep doing what is currently being done. But do that and you need to own the decline. After all, the UK and Thinkbox has shown the declines aren't inevitable and can be halted. You just have to be prepared to engage in the fight and do the work.