ITV’s Rhys McLachlan joins GVTLabs as Head of Media Partnerships to bring video intelligence to broadcasters and media owners
The architect of ITV’s Planet V and ITV Adlabs will lead GVTLabs’ work with media companies, turning their video libraries into searchable, monetizable assets
LONDON, Thursday, October 1, 2026: GVTLabs, the company behind AskGVT and founded by serial data entrepreneur Nick Halstead, today announced that Rhys McLachlan has joined as Head of Media Partnerships. McLachlan joins from ITV, where he spent six years as Director of Advanced Advertising, and will lead GVTLabs’ partnerships and commercial growth with broadcasters, publishers and rights holders.
Media companies are sitting on decades of video that audiences can’t search and advertisers can’t easily reach. GVTLabs turns that footage into a queryable layer: it watches every second of a video (speech, visuals, motion, story and sound) and returns the exact moment that answers a question, as a playable, timestamped clip. For media owners, that means archives that drive new content, new audience experiences and new advertising products.
McLachlan will lead GVTLabs’ enterprise products for media companies:
- GVTLabs Studio: private video intelligence across an entire archive, with answers returned as clips ready to use.
- GVTLabs Roster: helps brands and media owners find the right creators for a campaign, then measure what worked.
- GVTLabs Channels: portable ask-anything experiences built from a media owner’s talent, content and rights-holder material, deployable on their own or partner properties.
Thirty years building what’s next in TV advertising
At ITV, McLachlan built and launched Planet V, ITV’s addressable advertising platform, which has generated more than £1 billion in cumulative ad revenue and now handles over 95% of ITV’s digital ad revenue. He also created ITV Adlabs, UK broadcasting’s ad innovation unit, which shipped Retail Match, AutoMatch with Carwow, GeoX hyperlocal targeting, dynamic weather targeting, automated contextual targeting and, most recently, a Lead Gen product for connected TV. As a member of ITV Commercial’s executive leadership team, he held P&L responsibility for more than £500 million in annual digital ad revenue.
McLachlan also led ITV’s strategic data and technology partnerships, including InfoSum, where he served as board observer from 2020 until the company’s sale to WPP in 2025, working alongside InfoSum founder Nick Halstead.
Before ITV, he was employee #12 at Videology, scaling its UK and EMEA business from £12 million to more than £100 million, and was a key architect of GroupM’s Finecast addressable video business during eight years at MediaCom. He is a member of the Adwanted Speaker Hall of Fame, named in VOD Professional’s Top 50, and a regular voice on ad quality in connected TV, known for his “no tomatoes in the fruit salad” warning about bad actors in the ecosystem.
Quotes
Nick Halstead, founder and CEO, GVTLabs: “I’ve worked with Rhys for years, from ITV’s side of the InfoSum table. Nobody understands how broadcasters make money from video better than he does. Media companies have the richest video libraries in the world, and almost none of it can be searched. Rhys is the person to help them change that.”
Rhys McLachlan, Head of Media Partnerships, GVTLabs: “I’ve spent my career building advertising products that didn’t exist yet. What GVTLabs has built is the missing layer for every broadcaster and publisher: finally being able to ask your archive a question and get back the exact moment. That changes what media owners can make, what audiences can find, and what advertisers can buy.”