Commercial advertising on the BBC - not big and not clever

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

Comments

[Wiley]

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.

[Huw Leslie]

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.

[James Barbour]

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.

[Simon Collister]

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.