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Nearly three years ago, Jennie Baird, chief product officer of BBC Studios, was tasked with helping to lead a complete overhaul of BBC.com, the organization’s global news site and app. The publisher, which Baird described as existing “like oxygen” for its U.K. audience, wanted to cultivate greater stronger global consumption of its brand as it faced stronger economic headwinds at home.
BBC Studios is the global, commercial arm of the public broadcaster and a key vehicle for revenue generation amid its ever-tightening, publicly funded U.K. budget via a national TV license fee. “The goal for BBC Studios is to be able to contribute back commercial returns that can offset any potential future loss in public funding or reduction in public funding,” Baird said.
The problem: The face BBC was presenting to global news consumers was, as they say in the U.K., something of a dog’s breakfast at the time. BBC.com was overrun with visual clutter. Ads jumped on top of ads that already sat atop text content, video or navigation buttons.
“Every single piece of code that you’re putting on that page is competing with another piece of code that you’re putting on that page and is making your site slower,” Baird said. “Being slow is the worst thing you can be on the internet, for your consumer but also for your discovery engines like Google. Then, when you have the visual clutter, people sort of have ad blindness and they’re just scanning for where there’s content.”
Her solution to the “very scary” looking code