By Jonathan Easton

Planet V, the programmatic advertising platform from ITV, has officially launched.

The British pubcaster said that developers from Amobee have spent almost 50,000 hours building the platform. Planet V, it said, gives advertisers and agencies greater control over the planning, purchasing and reporting of campaigns across its catch-up service ITV Hub.

Planet V promises “new addressable audience products and data-driven features, built upon ITV’s first party data and select premium data partners.” ITV said that Planet V also offers addressable audience products and data-driven features built on ITV’s first party data of 32 million users and select premium data partners.

The platform is wholly self-service, with accessibility 24 hours a day. Planet V has been operational for some time internally, working as an in-house concierge solution and fulfilling almost 500 million ITV Hub impressions.

The streamer itself has seen a significant rise in consumption over the past 12 months, with viewing hours up 75 per cent year-over-year thanks to programmes such as Britain’s Got Talent Unseen and The Towie Years.

Director of advanced advertising at ITV, Rhys McLachlan said: “Over the course of the next few years, the rate of change in the way content is produced, distributed and consumed to enable addressable advertising is only going to continue to accelerate. To ensure that we are at the forefront of driving change that works for both ITV and our customers, we have created Planet V.

“This continuously evolving platform is designed to provide clients and advertisers with an unrivalled combination of access to premium video content, and programmatically enabled targeted advertising, whilst continuously operating at ITV’s gold standard level.”