BBC positions itself to emerge strong from lockdown slowdown with new deal
BBC Global News, the commercial ex-UK arm of BBC News responsible for BBC.com and the 24-hour global news channel BBC World News, announces today that it has signed an exclusive commercial deal with TripleLift.
The company will serve as the exclusive native partner of BBC Global News for the United States and Canada, responsible for programmatically serving native advertising on some of the most heavily trafficked pages on BBC News, Sport, the BBC.com homepage, and Feature sites. This is the first time commercial creative will be embedded within content areas usually the preserve of internal promotions.
This deal shows the value advertisers and audiences continue to place on placements closely tied to news content, and will help the BBC, its partners, and clients emerge strong from the Coronavirus pandemic.
Michael Lehman, SVP Global Supply at TripleLift, said: “The BBC is one of the most respected and trusted News organizations on earth. It’s a compelling opportunity to partner with them given the importance of high-quality journalism — now more than ever. The industry and our communities count on thriving news networks, and a direct-to-publisher relationship helps ensure that.”
Errol Baran, BBC Global News SVP Business Development & Innovation, Global Advertising & StoryWorks, said: “At the BBC, our premium audiences and market leading news content offer our carefully selected commercial partners the perfect environment within which to grow their respective businesses. This is exactly the type of commercially innovative partnership we seek. TripleLift are well respected, forward thinking and have an excellent creative portfolio. We are looking forward to building what we believe will be a long term mutually beneficial arrangement.”
The BBC has worked closely with TripleLift to deliver the first integrated native advertising experience across the BBC.com portfolio. It is key that we delivered an experience in keeping with each of the sites’ UX while balancing this with our editorial need to ensure the distinctiveness of advertising for our users.
Native advertising is traded on viewability, an industry standard which seeks to provide advertisers with assurances as to how long their creative will likely appear in view for.
Such metrics might ordinarily be achieved through ‘sticky’ ads, ensuring that creative remains on screen, anchored to the masthead while the page scrolls. In this instance with the format designed to be integral to the page layout a different approach was taken – lazy loading. Now ads are only requested when we determine they are likely to be scrolled into view by the user, maximising viewability for the advertiser. BBC.com’s total viewability is now on average 67%, with some of our biggest site sections on native, such as news stories, consistently scoring 70% viewability and above, far exceeding industry standards. With the recent viewability changes, this has so far resulted us in participating in over 10 times more of these auctions than previously.
Notes
BBC World News and BBC.com, the BBC’s commercially funded international 24-hour English news platforms, are owned and operated by BBC Global News. BBC World News television is available in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide, and over 465 million households and 3 million hotel rooms. The channel is also available on over 180 cruise ships, 53 airlines, including 13 distributing the channel live inflight. BBC.com offers up-to-the-minute international news, in-depth analysis and features, including BBC Worklife, BBC Culture, BBC Future, BBC and BBC Reel, for PCs, tablets and mobile devices to more than 110 million unique browsers each month.
