How does the BBC use cookies for commercial purposes (outside the UK)?
If you access the BBC website or the BBC News and Sport Apps from outside the UK (the “International Services”), you will see commercial advertising, content recommendations, and advertiser microsites (“Ads”). Ads enable us to generate income to help fund BBC services and make them available to you outside the UK.
If you are in the UK and you can see Ads, or if you’re outside the UK and you've seen what you believe to be inappropriate Ads on the International Services, please read this FAQ for advice. Alternatively, you can contact BBC Studios (who are responsible for the advertising) via: https://www.bbcstudios.com/contact/contact-us/.
Advertising on International Services
BBC Global News, a BBC Studios company, is responsible for the Ads you see on the International Services. Depending on your cookie and data settings, some of these Ads may be personalised based on information known or inferred about you and your interests. This personalisation helps us to show you more relevant Ads. It also means we can receive more revenue from our advertisers, allowing us to invest more in great content.
We will also show you Ads relevant to the content you are consuming (contextual advertising). For example, if you are reading an article about travel then we might show you Ads for airlines.
To create an ad profile for personalisation, unique identifiers (IDs) are used to tell your device apart from others – such as an ID stored by a cookie, or your Mobile Ad ID (a unique code set by your mobile operating system). You can opt-out from these IDs being used for ad personalisation by following the instructions below.
Broadly speaking, our advertising is managed in two ways:
1. In-house with the help of contracted data processors
Our premium advertising is managed in-house using a platform provided by Permutive, a specialist privacy-centric advertising platform. The platform is driven by our own “first party” data that we have collected from you or your device. This data includes registration information collected when you sign-up for our services (e.g. BBC Account), data based on what you consume when using our services (e.g. articles read, adverts clicked on), technographic information (e.g. browser, device and Internet Service Provider) and your location (at a country level). We then use this data to put you into cohorts with other users with shared characteristics (age, interests). These cohorts are then used to select relevant Ads to show to you.
We sometimes work directly with our advertiser clients to enable them to use their own customer data to personalise their Ads. They may do this by matching data to known customers or to look for ‘lookalike’ customers based on similar characteristics. When we do this, we use specialist technologies to keep data separated and secure, and we do not directly share or enrich our own data sets via this process.
We also work with specialists to make sure real people (not bots) are seeing Ads, and to make sure our website is safe.
We do not share your registration data or “cohorts” with advertisers or anyone else (except our contracted suppliers who process data under our instruction).
2. Automated advertising trading and personalisation
We and our advertisers also work with a range of advertising and data companies (“Advertising Vendors”) to show you Ads, both personalised and non-personalised. This includes specialist platforms and networks to: sell our ad space in online auctions, select and deliver the Ads, and collate and manage the data needed to personalise Ads. Generally, these companies will be acting as separate data controllers or may be acting under the instruction of their advertiser client rather than us.
Advertising Vendors will use data shared by your device alongside profile data inferred from your internet browsing and marketing information that they may hold about you. See FAQs 1 & 2 for more.
Ad Personalisation Settings
If you are in the EEA, when you first accessed the International Services, we will have asked your permission to use cookies and data for commercial purposes. We will automatically refresh this permission every 12 months or sooner if (i) we add new Advertising Vendors to the services, (ii) you or your browser delete the cookie which stores your preference or (iii) on occasion when we are required to update our technology or technology provider.
To manage your cookies and the use of your data by our Advertising Vendors, click on “Manage commercial data preferences” below. Please be aware that if you have previously changed your commercial cookie settings, clicking the blue button will reset your choices.
You can also opt-out by changing your browser or device settings. You can learn how to do this in FAQ 7 below.
If you opt-out or make any changes to your browser settings, you will continue to see non-personalised and contextual Ads. Some data, such as your IP address, will be used to show you a non-personalised ad even if you opt-out. We may also use your IP address to measure the effectiveness of Ads, to limit how many times you see an ad, and to make sure humans, not robots, are seeing the ad.
Advertising Cookie Settings
You can opt-out from the use of your data by us and our Advertising Vendors to personalise advertising by clicking below.
BBC Account Personalisation Setting
Signed in users can also opt out of the use of registration data for advertising purposes by turning off personalisation in their Account settings, here: https://account.bbc.com/account/settings/privacy.
