Oh what a night!

The ITV Palooza, ITV’s showpiece commercial event celebrating and highlighting the very best in commercial programming and advertising innovation returned for 2025 in a brand new venue of The Barbican.

Hosted by Graham Norton and in front of an invited audience of  the biggest names from the worlds of showbiz, creativity and advertising, ITV showcased exactly what makes TV, and TV advertising so special alongside some spectacular entertainment on-stage treats.

We kicked the night off with a musical number, taking a look back through the decades at some of the most iconic ads ever made, brought to us by the wonderful ITVees and musical cast - ending on the iconic Cadbury’s Gorilla ad (yep we called him up).

ITV CEO Carolyn McCall welcomed creative talent, agencies and advertisers to the event, and unveiled a sneak peek of ITV’s new brand campaign TV ad, which will launch fully in early 2026.

The evening celebrated the very best in commercial programming and advertising innovation, highlighting TV’s enduring power as the undisputed champion for brand-building. We revealed two brand new announcements - the launch of ITV Live Addressable+ and a new commercial partnership with TikTok, and showcased the success of Pause Ads and Dynamic Pause Ads as well as ITV’s suite of measurement tools - Outcomes Planner, Analytics Lift and Lantern. Plus we took a sneak peek at the incredible content that will be hitting our screens in 2026 within the world of sport and beyond. 

ITV’s MD of Media and Entertainment, Kevin Lygo, was interviewed by Graham Norton and gave the audience a taster of the incredible programmes due to hit screens in 2026 including The Neighbourhood, a major new entertainment format which sees families and households compete in a street-sized reality game, battling it out for the chance to take home a life-changing cash prize.

From what will be a big year for drama across a varied, premium slate, the audience saw clips of Secret Service, Betrayal, Adultery and The Lady, as well as first look at hot returner Red Eye, which sees Jing Lusi back, joined by Martin Compston to solve a new high-stakes conspiracy. 2026 is a big year for ambitious new entertainment formats, with the audience given a taster of what's to come in a reel featuring The Summit, The Heat, Celebrity Sabotage, Nobody’s Fool, The Box and more. These shows are all new for 2026, airing alongside ITV hit returners including The Masked Singer, Britain’s Got Talent, Love Island, The 1% Club and The Assembly.

Kelly and Dags

Kelly Williams and Simon Daglish, known far better across the industry as Kelly and Dags, ITV’s MD and Deputy MD of Commercial showcased the biggest and brightest innovations in TV advertising and celebrated the medium’s enduring power as the undisputed champion for brand-building.

They highlighted four reasons for this:

• Creativity - The simple, combined power of sight and sound as the ultimate storytelling machine

• Attention - TV commands far more attention and almost three times as much active attention compared to social media

• Trust - TV is the most heavily regulated advertising medium, and the flipside of that friction is unmatched trust

• The Multiplier Effect -  TV doesn’t just work in isolation; it also lifts the performance of other advertising channels

Kelly and Dags then led the audience through some of the most innovative commercial partnerships and AFEs on screen - everything from Tesco Clubcard’s sponsorship of Britain’s Got Talent driving more traffic to the Tesco website during BGT than over Christmas, to Google’s Pixel FC launching The Final Comment - a ground-breaking content series appearing in ITV Sport's social output, and interrupting Corrie’s iconic theme tune with the chilling sound of a flatlining heartbeat for the British Heart Foundation. Plus the biggest AFE on British TV - Win Win with People’s Postcode Lottery.

Moving on to celebrate innovation and how ITV is re-engineering TV advertising for the future, the duo highlighted the phenomenal growth of ITVX, which has been the largest commercial BVOD platform across every month of the last two years. Plus ITV and YouTube’s partnership delivering premium, brand-safe content that delivers significant incremental reach.

Alongside two brand new announcements - the launch of ITV Live Addressable+ and a new commercial partnership with TikTok, Kelly and Dags highlighted the success of Pause Ads and Dynamic Pause Ads plus ITV’s suite of measurement tools - Outcomes Planner, Analytics Lift and Lantern.

2026 Sport

Looking ahead to 2026, the Palooza celebrated the most exciting advertising opportunity of the year - live, free-to-air sport on a scale we’ve never seen before. For the 2026 6 Nations ITV will exclusively broadcast 10 live matches, including every England fixture, home and away. And for the first time, ITV is trialling an exciting new creative format during the Six Nations: picture-in-picture ads. There will be two opportunities per game - one in each half - when there’s a break in the action just before a scrum. It’s impactful, high-attention and a UK media-first. 

Plus The FIFA World Cup 2026. Two thirds of ITV’s games will be in peak time—almost double the peak games of the last two tournaments-giving advertisers an unprecedented opportunity to reach and connect with millions of fans. ITV will also be selling fixed spot packages, as well as more bespoke airtime packages.

Kelly and Dags championed why there are so many reasons to be excited about TV advertising. Mass reach in a trusted brand safe environment, the reach and viewing of ITV linear plus addressability at scale, plus the incremental reach now offered through our content on YouTube and now TikTok, the Creative Boost from deliver creative solutions at scale, and finally we can now measure the effectiveness of all of this with a suite of outcome measurement tools.

Ending the night we were lucky enough to have the incredibly talented performers from The Assembly join us to close the show. A huge thank you to all of our clients and talent that joined us to celebrate ITV!