A wonderful playground with Kate Waters: ITV Strategy and Commercial Head on the magic of TV, imaginative repetition, and banishing ROI as a metric

In this episode, host Ben Norman is joined by Kate Waters, Director of Client Strategy & Planning at ITV and a leading voice on the effectiveness of TV advertising.

Kate has spent over 20 years at ITV and works with many of the UK’s biggest advertisers, helping them understand how to get the most out of TV in an increasingly complex media landscape.

She is widely recognised for her work championing the power of TV effectiveness, her contributions to industry thinking on attention, emotion, and profit, and for helping brands translate evidence from bodies like the IPA into practical marketing decisions.

Despite being one of the busiest people in advertising, Kate is also involved with both ⁠WACL⁠ and ⁠Purpose Disruptors⁠.

In this conversation, Kate and Ben cover:

• Why it’s difficult to leave a job when you’re a co-founder
• How a single day with ⁠Fiona Parashar⁠ changed Kate’s career
• The relationship between creative and media, and why ITV is a wonderful playgroundfor a strategist
• Why TV is both the same and completely different today as it was 20 years ago
• How Tesco doesn’t let its size stop it from being a great advertiser
• How McDonald’s hits the nail on the head every single time
• How Google and ITV’s partnership shows the benefit of brand values coming together
• Why TV is as good at activation as it is at brand building, and why we need to think about marketing performance… not performance marketing
• 5.5 reasons why smaller brands shouldn’t rule TV out
• Why ROI should be banished, and how it pushes brands towards efficiency over effectiveness
• Why John Bartle’s “imaginative repetition” is the greatest definition of great advertising
• Plus, how Kate almost killed the Milky Bar Kid, and why we need to bring back Morrison’s singing oven gloves.

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