Experimentation is at the heart of how we approach marketing at the BBC. Testing and learning on how we let audiences know what BBC content is most relevant to them and we know they might love underpins our digital marketing strategy. However, experimentation in marketing typically requires more time spent on the creative work to make extra assets. Generative AI offers a great opportunity to speed up making the extra assets to get more experiments live for more content that we are trying to promote.

We’re going to take it one step a time, starting simple and learning as we go. We have chosen to start with Doctor Who, as it is a joint content priority for both BBC Public Service UK and BBC Studios marketing teams. There’s a rich variety of content in the Whoniverse collection on iPlayer to test and learn with, and Doctor Who thematically lends itself to AI which is a bonus.

We will be creating human-written marketing copy for a Doctor Who push notification, email subject line and in the promotional rail on BBC Search – then we will be using generative AI to suggest copy variations which are then reviewed and approved by our marketing team before being shown to the audience. Their success will be measured by click- rates, open-rates, and post-impression conversion-rates across each channel.

Transparency & Human Oversight

The BBC is committed to being open and transparent and applying human oversight to our use of generative AI. So we’re approaching these marketing pilots in a careful and measured way, always grounded in the BBC’s Responsible AI approach and our Editorial Guidance. That’s why we’re writing this blog, and we’ll keep it regularly updated with our plans.

All AI generated content used in these pilots will be reviewed and approved by a senior member of the marketing team, following the same compliance procedures we already apply to all our content.

And to make sure our audiences know when and where we’re using generative AI, we’re taking a layered approach to transparency. Where we experiment on the BBC Search page, and in our Dr Who emails, we’ll label the content directly

• Search: “This page is part of a pilot [link], and some of it may have been written with the assistance of AI (and reviewed by our team).”
• Email footnote: “As part of a pilot to improve the effectiveness of our communications [link], some of this email may have been written with the assistance of AI (and reviewed by our team).”

For the experiment with push notifications there isn’t space to include a label directly in the notification, which is why we’re writing this blog to tell you about it.

How are we measuring success?

The aim of this pilot is to try to increase the number of people who see the marketing who then go on to watch the promoted content. But we also want to understand the technology better – the creative possibilities as well as how well it performs – and get a feel for how our teams feel about using it. We will continue to update this blog as we use generative AI technology to experiment more with our marketing communications.