BBC Studios is developing its own ID solution as it seeks to woo global advertisers

The Office (the original one). Doctor Who. That infamous Prince Andrew interview. Over its 100-plus-year history, the BBC has drawn global audiences by broadcasting some of Britain’s most memorable television.

Today, however, compelling content is just one part of the equation. To compete for international attention and ad budgets — against media giants like Instagram, Netflix and peers like The New York Times — BBC Studios, the BBC’s commercial arm, is investing in ad tech, refining the user experience and streamlining its programmatic supply chain.

In an interview with The Current, James Wildbore, SVP and general manager for ad sales at BBC Studios, says that the broadcaster is developing its own identity solution to help advertisers better reach their audiences.

“The coming discussion is all about data privacy and programmatic and how those two go together,” Wildbore says.

“It’s currently in flight to design our own ID solution that will adhere to the strongest privacy guidelines that exist,” he adds. “With the idea being that we will be able to protect people’s privacy, whilst also pivoting more towards contextual ads, rather than tracking ads.”

The emphasis on data privacy is not surprising given the BBC’s pedigree. The U.K. has stringent data privacy laws, and regulators have made it clear that data privacy will be a key focus this year. BBC Studios is taking a proactive stance.

Its technical approach may differ from that of other publishers. At The Trade Desk’s FWD25 event in February, Paramount’s president of advertising, John Halley, encouraged publishers to adopt identity solutions already widely used by media buyers — such as Unified ID 2.0 or ID5. BBC Studios is developing its own identity solution, but the objective is the same: to improve advertiser addressability while keeping user privacy at the center.

Cleaning up the supply path

BBC Studios is also focused on maximizing the yield on its ad inventory — especially as AI chatbots threaten to siphon away referrals from search traffic. Perhaps counterintuitively, turning off some sources of demand has helped it achieve better yield.

About a year ago, the company decided to switch off demand from Google Display Network (GDN), which Wildbore describes as “the low-quality part of the pipeline.” It took eight months for revenue to return to, and then surpass, its previous level.

“Once audiences had realized that we weren’t serving them up junk, we had fewer complaints. The rebound in revenues followed as we were able to price up the inventory, work with our supply chain to ensure inventory was packaged correctly and we generated a higher return from walking away from the low-end filler stuff,” Wildbore says.

Other recent improvements to BBC Studios’ ad tech stack include removing data brokers to ensure all ads are now based on first-party data, introducing dynamic ad loads and moving to a server-side parallel auction with header bidding, according to a BBC spokesperson.

Wooing global audiences and advertisers

Britain’s leading news organization is no stranger to disruption, having survived a world war, several economic crises and a global pandemic. The coming years, though, could be the most defining ones yet for the BBC as it navigates uncertainty around its publicly funded model in the U.K. In this context, income from its global commercial activities — including advertising — becomes increasingly important.

Among other initiatives, the broadcaster has introduced a new AI-powered news department, decentralized its global news operations to six regional hubs and launched a BBC News FAST channel in the U.S. Last year, it also relaunched its BBC.com site, which serves advertising as it is intended for audiences outside of the U.K.

Last month the broadcaster said its podcasts would now sit alongside its news content on BBC.com and the BBC app to further entice international audiences.

“We’ve now got a 360 package with our digital assets. Read, watch, listen. We can offer innovative, 360 campaigns to advertisers,” Wildbore says.

Last year saw the launch of the BBC’s first-ever brand campaign outside of the U.K., a step that Wildbore says helped “crystallize the difference to our competitors” “We’re giving our audiences the information that they need to inform their own decision-making about the world.”

That increased brand awareness appears to be paying off. The BBC is now ranked among the top 20 news publishers in the U.S., according to Comscore, up from the mid-20s position last year and mid-30s two years ago.

Similarweb data collated by Press Gazette shows visits to BBC.com from U.S. users increased 30% year on year in February. Internal BBC data shared with The Current shows that global visitors to BBC.com increased 19% year on year in the same month.

“All of our decisions have been around the trust of audiences, using their data correctly, with their privacy concerns front of mind, whilst acknowledging that ad sales help fund content,” Wildbore says.

“The ambition is that BBC Studios continues to increase its level of funding back into the BBC,” he adds.