How to plan your 2027 media budget beyond the major platforms

For UK and European brand teams, planning 2027 budgets means deciding where incremental spend will work hardest. Inside the largest platforms, competition keeps pushing costs up. This guide shows how to ring-fence an open web test alongside your regular spend, set the right goals for it and scale what proves its value.

Why should your 2027 media plan look beyond major platforms?

The largest platforms control their own inventory, audience data and measurement. You can target and report inside them, but data access is constrained, fragmented and often non-portable

Because of their scale and consented data, these platforms will stay central to most plans. The planning question is where the next portion of budget earns the most. In Epsilon's Advertising Under Pressure research, 82% of UK marketers said they are further consolidating spend into the major platforms. UK audiences aren't growing at the pace of ad budgets, so more money competes for the same impressions and costs rise with it.

That spend is also buying less insight. 55% of marketers feel the platforms give them too little data to plan cross-channel campaigns, even though 51% name cross-channel reach and frequency control as a priority. Shoppers, meanwhile, discover brands across search, retailer sites, stores, social media and comparison sites.

Where should you start?

Setup is lighter than most teams expect. A site tag can observe things such as pages viewed, products browsed, repeat visits, recency, and engagement patterns. It also provides any available technical signals, such as device/browser context and any identifiers the visitor has consented to share.

Those observations become a starting population: for example, “people who viewed pricing pages twice in the last 30 days” or “visitors who abandoned a high-intent product page.” You don't immediately need transaction feeds, a data team or big structural changes to how you plan and buy.

However, the tag does not inherently know who a visitor is across devices, channels, or data sources. It also does not resolve an anonymous browser event to an email, household, CRM record, or advertising ID on its own.

That matters because a raw tag audience may be small, fragmented, or non-addressable. To activate it across paid media, measure it against sales, or enrich it with attributes, those events need to be matched to a persistent identity.

What the right partner adds

An identity partner brings an identity graph, matching infrastructure, and often a clean-room environment. It takes the tag-derived seed audience and links it, using permitted identifiers such as hashed emails, phone numbers, device IDs, or other join keys, to a broader, more durable view of people or households.

That layer draws on consented end-user IDs built independently of the brand, through direct publisher relationships, compliant third-party sources such as consumer classification and survey providers, and commerce partnerships.

Epsilon's CORE Identity draws on consented, publisher-sourced IDs across display, online video and CTV, with no reliance on third-party cookies. That matters in the UK, where more than 65% of consumers limit or reject cookies.

How to build an open web test into your 2027 budget

1. Settle on a goal. Decide whether the add-on is there to find incremental reach or to build awareness with audiences you already value. A single objective keeps the result readable.
2. Match environments to that goal. Connected TV and online video suit awareness goals, while display suits reach and site actions. Video now makes up more than half of display investment in Europe, which makes it a mainstream choice rather than an experiment. Brands such as Currys run CTV, online video and display together, and report conversions 46% higher than display alone.
3. Agree success measures before anything is bought. Choose brand lift, incrementality against a holdout, or site actions, and agree them with whoever signs off next year's budget. Decide at the same point what result moves the test into the core plan and what ends it, so nobody reinterprets the outcome once it arrives.
4. Time flights to run alongside regular activity. Experiments work best when they sit within normal spend, so the control group faces the same conditions as the exposed group. Periods with less direct competitive pressure for your category, such as Boxing Day and the January sales, are worth using for part of the test, since the same budget may go further there.
5. Review mid-flight against the agreed rule. Check progress at a set point rather than waiting for the end, using the measures from step 3. This gives you time to adjust before the next planning round, and stops a weak early read from being argued away or a strong one from being oversold.
6. Move budget in stages and carry the learnings forward. If the result clears the scale rule, shift a defined share into the core plan and run the next round from a stronger starting point, using what you learned about which audiences and environments responded.

Find out more about Epsilon Digital

If you'd like to see how this could work for your own brand, reach out for a conversation about how Epsilon Digital stitches display, online video and CTV together through identity.

It's a sensible place to start as 2027 budget conversations begin, because the setup is lighter than most teams expect and what you learn from the very first campaigns will start adding value to your plans.

Book a free 30-minute consultation.