Adwanted UK

Adwanted UK is a London-based media planning, data and information service that sits behind much of the day-to-day trading of British advertising. Based at 114 St Martin's Lane in London, the company — long known to the industry as Mediatel — provides the planning platform, audience data integrations and trading systems that agencies, media owners and advertisers use to plan, buy and verify campaigns across television, radio, publishing, outdoor and digital media. Its own description in the batch record, as a London media planning and data service formerly called Mediatel that supplies advertising audience data and media industry news, captures only part of a business that also publishes The Media Leader, runs major industry events, and operates systems that have quietly underpinned British radio and outdoor trading for decades.

From Mediatel to Adwanted UK

The business began as Mediatel, a small media data and news provider founded under Derek Jones. By 2019 Jones, stepping down as chief executive to become executive chairman, was able to look back on a company he had helped found 38 years earlier — a history that places its origins at the start of the 1980s, when media planning data was still distributed in printed form and on early electronic services. Greg Grimmer took over as chief executive from 1 July 2019. In March 2021 Mediatel joined the Adwanted Group, an international group with complementary businesses in France and the United States led by group chief executive Emmanuel Debuyck. After a period of integration, Mediatel completed its rebrand to Adwanted UK, announced by Grimmer as the start of a new phase intended to bring the group's businesses closer together, share technology and expertise, and support international ambitions, while retaining the UK company's staff and core services.

Adwanted Connected and the Planning Workflow

The company's best-known product is Adwanted Connected, described by the company as a central hub for essential media planning data in the United Kingdom. Connected brings together, in a single platform, audience and trading currencies that planners would otherwise have to consult separately: television, radio, publishing, outdoor and online data, presented through channel-specific applications. For a planner building a campaign, the value is practical rather than theoretical. Reach, frequency, audience profile and cost information from different media can be compared on consistent definitions, schedules can be built and shared, and the underlying sources are the industry-agreed currencies rather than a media owner's own claims. Connected is used by agencies, media owners, brands and academic institutions, and the company has described itself as the UK's largest single source of media data for those users.

Publishing Data, ABC, Pamco and Jicreg

Within Connected, the publishing application illustrates how the platform works. Relaunched from the earlier Display app, the Publishing app set out to give an up-to-date, holistic view of UK print and digital publications, drawing together publisher brand listings and data from ABC, Pamco — the audience measurement body for published media — and Jicreg, the Joint Industry Currency for Regional Media Research. Users can search more than 8,000 publishing brands by title, category, genre or publisher, and the app added social and podcast metrics, additional Jicreg breakdowns and infographics drawn from multiple sources. A later partnership with Ipsos added a websites and apps report based on Ipsos iris, the UKOM-endorsed online audience currency, covering more than 7,000 websites and apps updated monthly, with metrics including audience numbers, average minutes per person, profile percentage and index. For planners, that integration meant published-media and online planning could be done from the same desk and the same platform.

J-ET and the Trading of British Radio

If Connected is Adwanted UK's planning face, J-ET is its trading backbone for audio. J-ET is the UK radio industry's trading and accountability system. Its origins lie in 1998, when the industry formed JICRIT to connect all parts of UK radio through one system, streamlining the buying process and giving all parties confidence in what had been booked and delivered. Developed and managed by Adwanted UK in its Mediatel days, J-ET automated briefing, booking and reporting for spot radio long before programmatic buying became a common term — a point the industry itself makes when it describes the system as revolutionary. Linear campaigns are verified and reported through Revelation, and in November the company launched digital audio trading within J-ET, reported through AudioLab, so that linear radio and digital audio campaigns could be traded in one system and independently verified. Industry figures from agencies and from Global's DAX audio business welcomed the move as bringing the same accountable environment to digital audio that spot radio had enjoyed for more than 25 years.

Outdoor: SPACE, Route and Playout

Adwanted UK's technology work extends well beyond radio. The company worked closely with the UK out-of-home industry for more than a decade on projects including SPACE, the outdoor industry's inventory and trading infrastructure, and the Route API — Route being the audience measurement service for outdoor advertising. In 2022, following a formal pitch process that included major technology consultancies, the outdoor trade body Outsmart appointed Adwanted UK to build and maintain Playout, a system intended to provide a single source of verified playout and delivery data for digital out-of-home campaigns. The ambition described for Playout was to give planners better, more up-to-date delivery data for econometric and media-mix modelling, and to help outdoor compete for digital budgets where advertisers expected near-instant feedback on whether their advertising had actually appeared. The appointment underlined the company's reputation as a neutral builder of industry infrastructure rather than a participant competing for media spend itself.

The Media Leader and Industry News

Alongside data and technology, Adwanted UK is a publisher. The Media Leader is its news, analysis and opinion title for the media and advertising industry. It began as Newsline, became Mediatel News, and rebranded to The Media Leader in February 2022 as part of a plan to become an international business-to-business publication, with a US edition launched under editor Omar Oakes, who had joined as editor of Mediatel News in May 2021. The title publishes daily news about broadcasters, publishers, agencies, platforms and regulators, alongside opinion columns from senior industry figures and its own analysis of audience, trading and policy developments. For the wider media industry — and for journalists at other outlets — its reporting of Joint Industry Currency releases, trading system launches and people moves makes it a trade news source in its own right, which is why Adwanted UK is catalogued as a media agency and information service rather than purely as a software company.

Events and Industry Community

The third strand of the business is events. Adwanted Events and Publishing, led in recent years by managing director Steven Scaffardi, who joined in 2019, runs a portfolio of conferences for the media and advertising sector. Scaffardi launched event brands including Future of Audio Europe, Future of Gaming and Future of Media, developed The Future of Brands, and was involved in established television-focused events that the company describes as market-leading conferences for the sector. He also devised, with the editor, the rebrand of Mediatel News to The Media Leader, and launched The Media Leader Awards and The Future 100 Club. During lockdown the events division created the Future of Diversity series, with a continuing commitment to more diverse and inclusive speaker line-ups. The events business matters to the company's position because it convenes the same planners, broadcasters and publishers who use its data — reinforcing its role as a meeting point for the industry as well as a supplier to it.

Position Among the Joint Industry Currencies

Adwanted UK does not itself own the main audience currencies — Barb for television, RAJAR for radio, ABC for published media, Pamco and Route for outdoor belong to their respective industry bodies — but it occupies the layer at which those currencies become usable. By integrating their data into Connected, operating Jicreg's presence for regional media, building Playout for outdoor and running J-ET for radio trading, the company connects measurement to money: the point at which an audience figure becomes a planned schedule, a booked campaign and a verified delivery report. Its offices in London sit alongside group offices in New York and Paris, reflecting the Adwanted Group structure, but the UK operation's work remains distinctly British in its reference points — the UK Joint Industry Currencies, UK regulators and the London agency market centred a short walk from its St Martin's Lane base.

Why Adwanted UK Matters to Media Coverage

For readers of a media directory, Adwanted UK is best understood as infrastructure. When a national newspaper reports that a television programme topped the Barb ratings, when a trade title reports a RAJAR quarter, or when a planner defends a schedule to a client, the numbers have usually passed through systems and platforms of the kind Adwanted UK builds and operates. Its news title reports those numbers; its Connected platform organises them; its trading systems turn some of them into bookings. That combination — data, technology, news and events under one roof, built up over more than four decades from Mediatel's early data services to the Adwanted rebrand — explains why a company most consumers have never heard of is, for the British advertising industry, a familiar and consequential name.