The BBC is about much more than news.
But it isn’t always easy for marketers to find audience connections across a content mix that includes hard-hitting global news coverage, tentpole TV series like “Planet Earth” and “Top Gear” and family favorites like the smash-hit “Bluey.”
Sketching out that cross-portfolio play is the main focus of BBC Studios’ digital-first ad sales strategy, as it expands its footprint in the US market, Jon Otto, SVP of ad sales for North America, told AdExchanger.
As Otto put it, the BBC is built on three content pillars: news, sports and entertainment. But, he said, while many advertisers recognize the value of individual properties, they often don’t see how to work with the BBC as a cohesive partner.
“There’s strong affinity of our premium brand, and there’s strong awareness of our individual titles, but there is a lacking linkage and continuity for advertisers to see us as one BBC at the partnership level,” he said.
Otto’s job is to rebuild that connection for marketers in North America. His priorities include a digital‑first strategy centered on a redesigned bbc.com and app, a sharper focus on the BBC’s most engaged audiences and growing direct relationships with brands that care less about raw reach and more about context and trust.
Leaning into the BBC’s built-in audience strengths
That cross-platform strategy pushes Otto to think about opportunities beyond single‑channel buys.
Within sports, for example, he sees the network’s coverage of F1, golf, soccer and tennis as a foundation for targeting the BBC’s high‑spending, executive‑heavy audiences.
“When you look at an F1 Grand Prix weekend, it looks more like Davos than it does a traditional sporting event weekend,” Otto said. That audience could be attractive to categories like financial services and tech that are already spending heavily on sponsorships and hospitality, he added.
For Otto, BBC Earth and Planet Earth enhance the network’s travel and lifestyle offerings, tapping into audiences that gravitate toward travel and culture content. He says this presents an opportunity to create stronger travel-focused communities and event-style advertising formats.
The aim is not to chase every in-demand audience category, Otto said, but to lean into places where the BBC already has a defined viewership.
The major test of this strategy over the next few years, he said, is whether BBC Studios can prove that it understands who its audiences are; how they move across news, sports and entertainment; and how brands can meet them there without treating them as just another impression.
The power of the BBC’s ‘habitual audience’
To build advertiser trust in its cross-platform audience journeys, the BBC is leaning on its first-party data and contextual signals about its content.
Those signals can sometimes surface unexpected insights about how the BBC’s content resonates for key segments.
Otto gave an example of a senior executive at a Fortune 500 company who comes to the BBC for news coverage. That same person might also be a luxury-travel enthusiast and a parent whose kids’ favorite show is “Bluey.”
“That audience can be broken out from a targeting standpoint,” he said, “but the real opportunity is we know how that persona is navigating across our portfolio.”
The BBC is also thinking about how to package its most consistently engaged audiences in ways that make sense for direct buyers.
Rather than waiting for traffic spikes tied to major news events or viewership bumps tied to popular shows, the network is zeroing in on what it calls its “habitual audience.” These are the people who engage with BBC programming regularly, instead of being drawn in through search and social.
Otto estimates that the habitual audience makes up roughly 7% to 8% of monthly visitors to bbc.com in the US, who consume around 35 to 40 page views per month.
Those numbers underpinned the recent redesign of bbc.com and its app experience for North America. The goal was to translate a global newsroom into what Otto calls a “window to the world” for US and Canadian users, then to align editorial, product and advertising around a set of highly engaged personas.
“For media planners, it’s a lot easier to build a plan around that kind of consistent engagement than around unpredictable surges from search,” Otto said.
Monetizing communities, not just impressions
If the first part of Otto’s plan for North American expansion is about modernizing the BBC’s digital foundation, the second is about enabling brands to plug into the portfolio to access communities, rather than broad demos. This kind of activation requires direct deals, according to Otto.
“The piece I’m most focused on right now is growth on the direct side and building out the right type of programs for a brand,” he said. That could include transactional programmatic guaranteed, but the value is aligning habitual audiences tied to specific editorial and IP across multiple platforms.”
The BBC’s digital redesign is also meant to make its ad inventory easier to segment, Otto said. If a financial services marketer, for instance, wants to reach executives, the advertiser can tap into BBC news and analysis built for that group, rather than scattering impressions across undifferentiated volume.
BBC also launched a subscription model in the US. Otto said it’s another sign that the company is trying to deepen relationships with its most committed readers and find new ways to drive lower-funnel performance among those engaged audiences, rather than simply expanding the top of the funnel.
And when it comes to monetizing the occasional traffic spike from a major news or entertainment event, that piece is handled by the BBC’s UK-based programmatic team, which prioritizes yield optimization, Otto said.
Essentially, BBC Studios’ strategy for US expansion emphasizes working with advertisers to build on the network’s audience strengths, instead of hyping the value of every impression, regardless of engagement.
“We can’t be everything to everyone,” Otto said. “What we can do is be very clear about who our audience is, where we have authority and how we build partnerships that actually matter to them.”
