The evidence

Eight numbers we can stand behind, and their weaknesses.

Almost every statistic on a video production website comes from a survey run by a video production company. This page uses none of them. What is here comes from econometric studies, the regulator and the professional bodies — and each one is published with the objection somebody could fairly make to it.

58% of profit arrives after the first 13 weeks

Profit Ability 2

Most of what advertising returns arrives after the window most people measure it in. If a campaign was judged at thirty days, it was judged before more than half the effect had happened.

An econometric study of 141 brands, £1.8bn of media spend, ten channels and fourteen sectors, 2021–23 — run by Ebiquity, Gain Theory, EssenceMediacom, Mindshare and Wavemaker.

The caveat Commissioned by Thinkbox, the marketing body for UK commercial TV. The analysis houses are independent and the method is econometric rather than survey-based, which is why we quote it — but a study paid for by the TV industry finding well for television is what you would expect, so treat the channel league table with more suspicion than the headline findings.

£1.87 profit per £1 in the short term, £4.11 over a full 24-month payback

Profit Ability 2

Advertising pays back, and it keeps paying back well after the campaign has stopped.

The same 141-brand study. Every product sector analysed showed positive payback over the full period.

The caveat It measures advertising with media behind it. A film made with no distribution plan is not in this dataset, and should not expect these numbers.

Creative is the biggest single driver of sales lift — media factors account for 36%

Nielsen

What the thing is actually like matters more than where it runs. Craft is not the decoration on the media plan; it is the largest single term in it.

Cross-media analysis of roughly 500 campaigns.

The caveat Media factors have been rising — 36%, up from 15% a decade earlier. Targeting and reach are catching up.

Social video is 59% of all UK social investment

IAB UK

For most companies, spending on social already means spending on video, whether or not anyone planned it that way.

UK digital adspend study. Digital video reached £9.3bn in 2025, up 20%, inside a £40.5bn digital market.

The second most-watched service in the UK, behind the BBC and ahead of ITV

Ofcom

“Our audience isn't on YouTube” is usually an assumption about age. It is now a living-room channel, watched on a television.

2024 viewing data, inside roughly four and a half hours of daily in-home video. Over-55s nearly doubled their daily YouTube minutes, and 42% of their YouTube viewing is on the TV set.

The caveat Broadcast still holds 56% of in-home viewing. This is a shift, not a collapse.

The only main media category UK marketers revised up in Q2 2026, at +8.2%

IPA Bellwether

Video is one of the few marketing lines going up rather than down.

Quarterly survey of UK marketing budgets. Main media overall was +1.5%, out-of-home −2.5% and published brands −8.3%. Events, at +11.0%, is the fastest-growing activity tracked.

The caveat It is a survey of intentions, not of money spent. It tells you the direction, not the amount.

81% acted on employer brand; 14% measured it

CIPD

Hiring has a hard cost attached, most organisations have done something about their employer brand, and almost none of them can tell you whether it worked.

Resourcing and talent planning survey. Median cost per hire is £1,500, rising to £2,000 for senior managers, and 64% of organisations report difficulty attracting candidates.

The caveat Both the cost per hire and the difficulty figures have fallen since 2022, so this is not a “hiring has never been harder” argument. The gap between acting and measuring is the real finding.

£565 a day for an editor on promo work; £556 for a DoP, labour only before kit

Bectu

A quote at half the price of a production company is often below the union minimum for the people on it, which tells you what has been left out rather than what has been saved.

Published recommended minimum rates for the UK broadcast and promo sectors.

The caveat They are recommended minimums, not law, and plenty of good freelancers work below them by choice. It is a floor for judging a number, not an accusation.

Checked 29 September 2026. Every source above is a named organisation that does not sell video production, and every one can be looked up without paying for a report.

What we do not quote

You have probably been shown these already.

Naming them is not point-scoring. If you have heard the same figure from three suppliers, the fourth one to use it has told you something about their research rather than about video.

“91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool”, and its family of near-identical statistics

Traced back, nearly all of them come from one annual survey run by a video production company, of a self-selecting sample of marketers who agreed to answer a video marketing questionnaire. It measures enthusiasm among the already-converted. We have seen it sourced third-hand from other agencies' blogs on UK pages presenting it as UK data.

“The UK video production market is worth $5.8bn, growing to $66bn by 2033”

That report segments the market by genre — action, thriller, science fiction. It is a streaming-entertainment forecast with a corporate-video title on it. Any plan built on it is built on sand, and most paid market reports in this category have the same problem.

Any figure for what a company of your size “should” spend on video

There is no UK dataset that breaks video production spend down by company size. Anyone quoting one has either made it up or is repeating somebody who did. The honest anchor is proportional: asset production tends to run at roughly 5–10% of the paid media behind it, and higher where there is no media behind it at all.

The questions people actually ask

Including the two where the answer is that you are half right.

We tried video and it didn't work.

Two things usually happened. It was measured on a thirty-day window, and 58% of the profit arrives after week thirteen — so the measurement finished before most of the effect did.

Or there was no distribution behind it, which is the more common one. A film with no plan for where it runs is not in any of the studies above, and should not be expected to behave like the things that are.

We could shoot this ourselves on a phone.

Often you could, and arguing about it would be a poor use of both our time. The camera stopped being the hard part some years ago.

What is worth paying for is the room working every time without being rebuilt, someone who can tell you why the last one felt wrong, and the edit. That is what the studio work is, and it ends with you able to do it without us.

Won't AI make this cheap soon?

Partly, and it already has. Stock-style B-roll, straightforward talking heads, dubbing, first-pass edits and subtitling are all getting cheaper, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

What it cannot do is turn up at your premises and film your staff and your product on a real day. If a job is mostly the first kind, we will tell you, and we would rather build the hybrid with you than lose the argument slowly.

Our audience isn't on YouTube.

It is usually an assumption about age, and Ofcom has YouTube as the second most-watched service in the UK, behind the BBC and ahead of ITV.

Over-55s have nearly doubled their daily minutes on it, and 42% of that viewing happens on the television. Broadcast still holds 56% of in-home viewing, so this is a shift rather than a collapse — but the audience is not where the assumption puts it.

It's more than we expected.

Usually the number has nothing to sit against. A day is hard to judge; a cost per finished film is not, and that is the number worth comparing.

The other half of the answer is payback rather than price: £4.11 per £1 over a full twenty-four months, from a 141-brand study. If the work has no media behind it, that figure does not apply, and we would say so.

We don't know what we'd even make.

This is the most common thing anybody says, and the most fixable. It is not a persuasion problem, it is that nobody has written the list down.

Every price we charge is published, and the guide maps out the five films most companies need before anyone has spent anything. If the answer turns out to be that you do not need us yet, that is a fine answer.

The honest bit

Nobody knows how big the UK video production market is.

The official count puts around 3,600 video production businesses with real turnover against more than ten thousand company registrations — the gap being sole traders and dormant companies. The paid market reports that claim to size it are entertainment forecasts wearing a corporate-video title.

We would rather say that than quote a number we cannot defend. If a figure on this site ever looks convenient, ask where it came from — the answer is on this page, and where there isn’t one, we have left the figure out.

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