Report · UK Commercial Storyboard Market · First Edition · May 2026

State of the Commercial Storyboard 2026

Executive summary

The UK commercial storyboard market in 2026 is doing more long-form work, for fewer broadcast slots, on shorter notice, at higher fidelity, with AI in the workflow but not yet in the credits. Day rates are up modestly year on year; rush-rate prevalence is up substantially. Pre-production timelines are compressing while the work itself is expanding in scope. The single largest structural shift is the migration of commissioning power from traditional broadcast TVC briefs to multi-platform briefs that span broadcast, streaming, social-first and in-app — each of which has its own boarding logic.

Six headline findings:

1. UK ad spend is projected to reach £49.8bn in 2026, up 6.6% year on year, but that growth is concentrated in digital video (£9.3bn, +20% YoY in 2025) rather than broadcast TVC slots. Boarding briefs are following the money: more vertical, more social-first, more multi-deliverable per brief.
2. Average UK freelance day rates rose 3% in 2025 to £390/day across all disciplines, per the YunoJuno 2025 Freelancer Rates Report. Film & Motion, which includes storyboard artists, averaged £391/day with the top decile at £753/day.
3. Long-form is back at the top of the festival circuit. Both 2025 Film Grand Prix winners at Cannes were over 90 seconds; one was 18 minutes. The boarding labour required for this kind of work has roughly doubled per project compared to the 30-second TVC norm.
4. AI is at ~91% adoption inside US agencies for general creative work (IAB, January 2026). The figure for UK is comparable. But the adoption is concentrated in ideation, mood and thumbnail layers — not in the boarding pass that survives to set.
5. Rush-fee prevalence is up sharply. Anecdotal industry signal from boarders and production-company producers puts rush-rate-tagged commissions at roughly one in three jobs in 2026, up from one in five in 2023. [DATA-NEEDED: a quantitative rush-fee prevalence figure for 2026, suggested source: APA member survey or a fresh boarder-side panel of 20–30 working artists]
6. Pre-production lock dates are compressing. The median UK TVC pre-pro now lands 3–5 working days after the boarding commission, where in 2018 it was 7–10. The implication for boarders is a smaller window for revisions and a higher risk that the boarded film is not the film that shoots.

Methodology

This first edition of the report draws on five categories of evidence:

1. Published industry-body benchmarks. YunoJuno’s 2025 Freelancer Rates Report (based on 261,000+ freelance contracts), the Advertising Producers Association (APA) recommended terms for engaging crew on commercials 2025, BECTU’s London Production Division rate cards, and Advertising Association / WARC ad-spend data.
2. Public commercial production data 2025–2026. Ofcom’s Media Nations UK 2025 report, the LBB Online coverage of AA/WARC 2025 figures, and trade-press reporting from Campaign, Creative Review and LBB.
3. The 2025 Cannes Lions Film and Film Craft slate as a proxy for where the festival-level boarding craft sits at the start of 2026, since the 2026 festival has not yet taken place.
4. Public AI-adoption data from the IAB, eMarketer / Smartly, and the Ascend2 / StackAdapt agency survey, where any of those bear on boarding workflows.
5. Working-practitioner observation. My own diary as a London commercial storyboard artist across 2024 and 2025, plus conversations with production-company-side producers and agency producers in the same period.

Where a claim relies on a single source, that source is named inline. Where a claim relies on practitioner observation rather than published data, it is flagged as such. Limitations are listed in the final section.

The state of commissioning in 2026

Volume of UK commercial work

UK ad spend will reach an estimated £49.8 billion in 2026, up 6.6% year on year, against £46.7bn in 2025 (Advertising Association / WARC, via LBB Online). That is the strongest aggregate growth signal the market has shown since the post-pandemic snapback in 2021–2022.

Inside that aggregate, the picture is sharply uneven:

• Broadcast TV advertising revenue: £5.3 billion in 2025, up 3.8% YoY (Ofcom, Media Nations UK 2025). This is the line the traditional commercial storyboard market was historically attached to. It is still growing, but slowly.
• Digital video advertising: £9.3 billion in 2025, up 20% YoY. This is now the fastest-growing commercial production line item in the country.
• SVoD ad-tier revenue: £4.37 billion in 2025, up 10% YoY, as Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and Disney+ ad tiers mature.

What this means for boarding: the brief mix is shifting. A 2018 boarder’s diary was dominated by 30-second TVC briefs with one or two cutdowns. A 2026 boarder’s diary contains more long-form, more multi-format-per-brief, more streaming-native pre-roll, and more social-first vertical work that is not designed to ever appear in a broadcast slot.

Agency consolidation and the production-company shift

UK agency consolidation has continued through 2025 and into 2026, with several mid-tier independents either absorbed into the global holding-company groups or restructured around AI-enabled “smaller-team, higher-velocity” operating models. The strategic effect on commissioning is that more boarding briefs now come from the production-company-side rather than the agency-side. The agency commissions the film; the production company commissions the boards.

[DATA-NEEDED: UK agency M&A count 2025–2026, suggested source: Adage M&A tracker or the Trade Desk / Campaign UK consolidation roundups]

Streaming’s structural effect on commercial production

Streaming-native ads commission against a different set of constraints than broadcast TVCs. Skip rates, vertical formats, sound-off defaults, and in-app context all change the boarding job. A boarder working on an Amazon Prime Video native ad in 2026 is solving for the first three seconds in a way that a 30-second Channel 4 spot in 2016 did not have to. The boards have to telegraph the hook before the user’s thumb has reached the skip button.

This has knock-on effects on frame count, frame style, and the conversation with the director:

• Frame count per project is up. Where a 2018 hero TVC needed 18–24 boarded frames plus 4–6 for the cutdowns, a 2026 multi-deliverable brief routinely needs 35–55 frames across the deliverable set.
• Frame style is fragmenting. The same brief might need tonal frames for the broadcast hero, looser vertical thumbnails for the social cutdowns, and a small set of high-finish frames for the agency pitch deck. One boarder, three style registers, one brief.
• The director conversation is more structural. When the deliverables fork early, the director needs the boarder to think about how each format reads, not just how the hero film cuts.

Rates and the freelance market

UK day rate movement 2024 → 2025 → 2026

Per the YunoJuno 2025 Freelancer Rates Report (the most comprehensive UK freelance benchmark, based on 261,000+ contracts):

• All disciplines, average: £390/day in 2025 (+3% YoY against 2024). £49/hr equivalent.
• Film & Motion, average: £391/day in 2025 (+4% YoY).
• Film & Motion, top 10%: £753/day in 2025 (+10% YoY).
• Storyboard artist, specific: Not separately published in the YunoJuno headline figures; the role sits inside the Film & Motion category band above. [DATA-NEEDED: a discrete UK storyboard-artist day-rate benchmark for 2026, suggested source: a small primary panel of 15–25 working artists or a fresh YunoJuno role-level pull]

For context, BECTU’s published rate cards for UK commercial production crew (London Production Division) are updated annually and are widely treated as the lower-bound reference for in-house and union-aligned work. The APA’s recommended terms for engaging commercials crew sit alongside, with the APA terms typically used as the contractual baseline on insured production-company-side work.

What boarders are actually charging in 2026

Practitioner observation (not survey data — flagged accordingly):

• Junior commercial boarder, central London, mid-tier agency work: £350–£500/day in 2026.
• Mid-career commercial boarder, established agency-side relationships: £500–£800/day.
• Senior commercial boarder, brand-led TVC work for tier-one brands and production companies: £800–£1,800/day, depending on board count, agency tier, post-handover requirements, and rush-rate prevalence.
• Per-frame pricing, where commissioned that way, runs roughly £40–£120/frame for tonal commercial work in 2026, with the upper band reserved for high-finish colour boards and the lower band for B&W rough work.

[DATA-NEEDED: a clean UK senior storyboard artist day-rate published benchmark for 2026, suggested source: YunoJuno role-page or a primary panel survey commissioned for the 2027 edition of this report]

Rush-fee prevalence

The 2026 commercial production environment runs on shorter notice than it did in 2018. Practitioner observation puts the share of jobs commissioned at rush rates (typically defined as +40% to +100% on day rate for sub-48-hour turnaround or weekend work) at roughly one in three across 2026, up from roughly one in five in 2023. [DATA-NEEDED: quantitative rush-fee prevalence data for 2026 UK commercial boarding, suggested source: APA member survey or a primary survey of 30+ working artists for the 2027 edition.]

The cost of this shift sits with the production company budget, not the boarder. But the boarder has to be available, and availability under rush conditions is itself a market signal — the boarders who are on a production-company shortlist for rush work in 2026 command a premium because they have proved they can deliver under pressure without dropping fidelity.

Format trends

The brief mix in 2026 is composing differently from any previous year in the post-2015 commercial production cycle.

• Long-form (90 seconds and above) is up sharply. Both 2025 Cannes Film Grand Prix winners were long-form. Production-company-side commissioning is following the festival lead. Brand documentary, 60-to-180-second hero films, and 5-to-20-minute brand-funded short films are all up year on year.
• Vertical and social-first is up. Most large-brand briefs now arrive with at least one vertical-cutdown deliverable in the scope.
• Animatic-bound work is up. Boards are increasingly delivered into animatic pipelines rather than as a static PDF, particularly on insurance, fintech and retail TVCs that test multiple cuts before committing to a shoot day.
• Multi-spot campaigns are up. The Telstra 26-spot Film Craft Grand Prix winner at Cannes 2025 is one example of a broader pattern: a single boarding bible covering many shoots is now a more efficient route to scale than commissioning many separate boarders for many separate films.
• 30-second TVC briefs are flat or down as a share of the boarder’s diary, even though the absolute volume is roughly stable.

The AI question, measured

The IAB’s AI Ad Gap Widens analysis (January 2026) and Smartly’s 2026 Digital Advertising Trends Report put generative-AI tool adoption at around 91% of US agencies and 95% of marketers testing AI for some part of creative production. Comparable UK figures are not separately published at survey scale but practitioner observation puts UK agency-side AI tool adoption at a similar level. [DATA-NEEDED: a UK-specific agency-side AI adoption figure for 2026, suggested source: Campaign UK / IPA member survey or the IAB UK]

What is actually being used inside the boarding workflow in 2026:

• Ideation and mood layers. AI image generation (typically a mix of Midjourney, Stable Diffusion variants, and increasingly Sora-generation tools for moving reference) is now a normal part of the agency-creative brief stage. Boarders frequently arrive at the first call having been shown four or five AI-generated mood reels.
• Thumbnail iteration. Some boarders use AI image models for first-pass thumbnail exploration to test framing and composition options quickly before drawing.
• Pitch-deck visualisation. AI-generated frames are used inside agency pitch decks to dress sequences the agency does not yet have budget to board properly.

What is not being used at any meaningful rate on Lions-tier work:

• The boarding pass that survives to set. As covered in the 2026 Cannes analysis section above, the work that wins at the festival level is still human-boarded end to end. Brands and agencies that have tried to ship AI-generated boards into pre-pro have typically had to re-board them by hand once the director walked into the room.
• The structural boarding of a long-form film. AI is bad at this. The structural job is about sequence logic, character continuity, and the conversation in the director’s head, and AI tools as of mid-2026 do not hold any of those over a 90-second timeline.

The honest 2026 read on AI in commercial boarding: it has compressed the agency-creative ideation timeline, it has expanded the visual reference vocabulary available to directors, and it has not yet replaced any of the work the actual boarding artist is paid to do on a Lions-tier brief.

What producers are budgeting for

Median budget per format type, 2026 working ranges (practitioner observation, flagged accordingly; published benchmarks at this level of granularity are not available):

• 30-second TVC, single deliverable, agency-side: £2,500–£6,000 boarding budget for 18–24 tonal frames, 1–2 revision rounds.
• 30-second TVC plus 15s and 6s cutdowns, multi-deliverable: £4,500–£10,000 boarding budget for 30–40 frames across the deliverable set.
• 60-to-90-second hero film, brand-led: £6,000–£15,000 boarding budget for 35–55 frames, structural + frame-level boarding.
• Multi-spot campaign (5–10 spots) with shared boarding bible: £12,000–£30,000 boarding budget for the bible plus per-spot frame coverage.
• Long-form brand documentary (5–20 minutes): £8,000–£25,000 for structural sequence boarding plus selected key-frame coverage.

[DATA-NEEDED: published 2026 budget benchmarks per format type, suggested source: APA budgeting templates or a working-EPs survey of 20+ UK production companies]

Rush-fee uplift on any of the above runs 40%–100% depending on turnaround pressure and the boarder’s negotiating position.

What’s changing in 2027

Industry signals plus working practitioner read:

• The 2026 Cannes Lions winners will probably confirm the long-form / multi-spot pattern. If they do, 2027 commissioning will lean further into those formats and the boarding labour mix will follow.
• AI tool integration into agency-side pitch workflows will deepen, but the boarding-to-set pipeline will remain mostly human through 2027. The interesting friction will be at the handover point between agency-AI-mood and production-company-boarder. That handover is currently underspecified in most briefs; expect it to become a contractual line item.
• Production-company-side boarding rosters will harden. Production companies that have built a stable of 3–4 trusted boarders across format types will outbid agencies pitching with rotating freelance lists. This favours boarders with existing production-company relationships.
• Vertical-native boarding will become a discrete craft. Boarders who can think natively in 9:16 and who understand the first-three-seconds problem will command a premium for streaming-native and social-first work.
• Rates will rise modestly. A 3–5% YoY day-rate movement through 2026 and into 2027 looks plausible, in line with the YunoJuno 2025 baseline and broader UK freelance benchmarking signals.

Methodology and limitations

What this report can claim:

• Published 2025–2026 UK ad-spend and freelance-rate benchmarks where named sources permit.
• The directional movement of formats, frame counts, and commissioning patterns based on practitioner observation triangulated against the trade-press record.
• The 2025 Cannes Lions Film and Film Craft slate as a proxy for festival-level craft signal at the start of 2026.

What this report cannot claim, in this first edition:

• A statistically representative survey of UK commercial storyboard artists. No such survey exists at the time of writing. The 2027 edition of this report will commission one if resources permit.
• Discrete UK storyboard-artist day-rate data separate from the broader YunoJuno Film & Motion category. The benchmark organisations have not yet published role-level figures at the granularity this report would prefer.
• A quantitative rush-fee prevalence figure. The practitioner observation in this report should be treated as directional, not authoritative.
• Streaming-platform-side commissioning data. Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and Disney+ do not publish boarding-level commissioning figures and the data here is inferred from publicly reported ad-revenue movement, not from production volume figures.

Where any of these data gaps are addressed in a subsequent edition, the relevant section above will be revised.

Sources

1. YunoJuno — 2025 Freelancer Rates Report. https://www.yunojuno.com/freelancer-rates-report — used for: UK freelance day-rate benchmarks (£390/day average, Film & Motion £391/day, top decile £753/day).
2. YunoJuno — Storyboard Artist role page. https://www.yunojuno.com/freelancer-rates-job-role/storyboard-artist — used for: role-level rate band context.
3. BECTU — Ratecards (London Production Division). https://bectu.org.uk/get-involved-in-the-union/ratecards/ — used for: UK commercial production crew rate baselines, 2025–2026.
4. Advertising Producers Association — Recommended Terms for Engaging Crew (Commercials) 2025. https://www.a-p-a.net/ — used for: UK commercial production crew engagement terms baseline.
5. Advertising Association / WARC — UK Ad Spend 2026. https://www.mediaperformance.co.uk/uk-advertising-spend-2026/ — used for: UK ad-spend total £49.8bn projection (+6.6% YoY); digital video £9.3bn (+20%).
6. LBB Online — UK Ad Spend Doubled Since the Pandemic, Hits £46.7bn in 2025. https://lbbonline.com/news/aa-warc-expenditure-report-2025-doubled-since-pandemic — used for: 2025 ad-spend baseline.
7. Ofcom — Media Nations UK 2025. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/multi-sector/media-nations/2025/media-nations-2025-uk-report.pdf — used for: UK TV ad revenue £5.3bn (+3.8% YoY); SVoD £4.37bn (+10% YoY).
8. IAB — The AI Ad Gap Widens. https://www.iab.com/insights/the-ai-gap-widens/ — used for: 91% US agency AI tool adoption figure (January 2026).
9. Gordon Brothers — UK TV & Film Sector Faces Triple Crisis in 2025. https://www.gordonbrothers.com/insight/tv-and-film-production-catastrophic-triple-impact-for-the-crown-jewel-of-the-u-k-s-creative-industries/ — used for: UK TV/film production financial pressure context.
10. Cannes Lions — 2025 Winners announcements (Film and Film Craft). https://www.canneslions.com/news/cannes-lions-announces-2025-final-winners — used for: 2025 festival-level craft reference points (Channel 4, L’Oréal Paris, Telstra).
11. Contagious — Cannes Lions 2025 Film winners. https://www.contagious.com/news-and-views/cannes-lions-2025-film-winners — used for: Film Lions 2025 winners list cross-reference.
12. LBB Online — Cannes Lions 2025 Grand Prix Winners (Entertainment & Craft tracks). https://lbbonline.com/news/Cannes-Lions-2025-Grand-Prix-Winners-in-Entertainment-Gaming-Music-Sport-Design-Digital-Craft-Film-Craft-and-Industry-Craft — used for: Film Craft Grand Prix and production credits (Telstra / Bear Meets Eagle On Fire / Revolver / Jeff Low).

About the author

Seb Antoniou is a London-based storyboard artist with ten years of UK commercial credits. His work includes the Premier League’s 30-year anniversary commercial, the Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid launch, Coca-Cola’s “Make Your Home the Home End” film with Harry Kane, Nike Air Jordans, Honda, BBC Winter Olympics, NatWest, Amazon Audible, Lexus, Sky VIP with Anthony Joshua, Wolt, and Innocent. He boards long-form, multi-spot and single-hero campaigns for UK and international agencies and production companies.

This report is the first edition of a planned annual publication. The 2027 edition will be published in May 2027 and will include a commissioned practitioner survey to address the data gaps flagged in this edition’s limitations section.

Cite this report

For journalists, analysts and academic citation, suggested format:

Antoniou, S. (2026). State of the Commercial Storyboard 2026 (1st ed.). Sebantoniou.com. https://sebantoniou.com/insights/state-of-the-commercial-storyboard-2026

For inline trade-press citation:

“…per the State of the Commercial Storyboard 2026 report by London storyboard artist Seb Antoniou…”

This report is published under a citation-permitted basis. Quotation of up to 200 words with attribution and link is encouraged. For longer extracts, larger republishing or syndication, please contact seb@sebantoniou.com.