I’m in Brazil at the moment doing some training for Aberje, Brazil’s publc relations trade body. Last night when I logged into the BBC to get a dose of home news I was surprised to see several commercial ads running.
I presume that the BBC has an arrnagement whereby if you are accessing their site from outside of the UK they are permitted to serve up adverts, although I don’t recall seeing an announcement about this.
You can see from the screenshot below that there are two banner ads running – one for Subaru (top right) and another for Hublot (bottom left).
Even more interesting was that when I clicked on the iPlayer video to watch footage of the vile, washed-up, excuse for a singer that is Amy Winehouse delightfully try to punch a fan I had to sit through a 30 second TV ad for Subaru first (see image).
I don’t understand the BBC’s rationale for this – aside from generating revenue. It’s not big and it certainly isn’t clever.
Technorati tags: BBC, advertising
The ads must be served based on IP address because I only see the watch ad. Also, there is no pre-roll for the Winehouse clip from here in the U.S.
It’s about keeping the license fee low, which is surely a good thing. Brazilians have no entitlement to enjoy BBC content without any effort to monetise their attention, and I think the BBC owe it to us to do their best to make as much money as possible from oversees traffic through their commercial BBC Worldwide arm.
It’s not big, it’s not clever, and it does little to justify the relentless dive in quality that the BBC seems determined to pursue. See Charles Crawford on the subject, yesterday.
Thanks for all the comments.
@Wiley – Hey! How’s things? You’re right – the BBC then blocked me from watching their iPlayer content because i wasn’t in the UK
@Huw – I understand their drive to make money but think that annoying ads are not the way to do it. BBC World is a commercial entity; the BBC news website – in the UK at least – isn’t. So lets either keep commercial, commercial or free, free.
@James Barbour – Thanks. Will take a look.