BBC Good Food demonstrated a smart and considered approach, listening to audience trends to deliver content that resonates with impressive commercial results.

Throughout 2022 BBC Good Food again proved itself to be the most innovative food media brand in the UK. By predicting and responding to audience demands, the team produced relevant, quality content to support a nation in need, leading to an exceptionally strong set of results, an astonishing 1.2 billion page-views on their website. In 2022, they built new and accelerated existing revenue streams, including a strong and highly engaged subscriber app audience and developed editorial initiatives that supported the nation through the toughest of years. The teams are laser focused on innovation and understanding consumers and meeting their needs.

2022 was another incredibly challenging year in which BBC Good Food were working with tighter editorial budgets, a reduced team with a reduction of three members of the digital BBC Good Food team, economic anxiety and an increasingly competitive and challenging search landscape.

The cross-platform content team were swift to predict consumer behaviour in the looming economic crisis and reacted to changing audience needs to produce our biggest ever new content vertical: Cook Smart. The campaign launched across print and digital in response to rapidly rising food prices and energy bills.

Over 300 recipes were re-costed and over 100 new pieces of digital content commissioned. Cook Smart runs across all brand touchpoints, and the team rounded off the year with the now legendary £4pp Christmas Dinner. The campaign attracted money-can’t-buy media attention when the team took over BBC One Morning Live filmed from their test kitchen.

They also built their video production capability with the ambition to publish a video on every web page. This required an innovative approach to commissioning evergreen video content for multi-format use that also allowed them to deliver cut-down versions for all social media, including our brand new TikTok channel. This was a key strategic move to seek new audiences and help them to discover BBC Good Food content in the places where they look for inspiration and support.

Finally, they were quick off the mark to develop a multi-platform content approach to Air Fryer content reacting to extraordinary customer demand, including trend-led recipes, videos and reviews. This high performance content saw a rise of +2195% in impressions and over £2.5m of product sales.

BBC Good Food has seen strong results across all channels. The average monthly audience on bbcgoodfood.com grew 6% in 2022, and good food now reaches 25% of all Internet users [Source: Ipsos Iris]. Registered users are the ultimate benchmark for their digital properties, though, and in 2022 they added 452,100 consumers to their databases. Subscriptions revenues across all channels increased by 4% and transactional revenues on bbcgoodfood.com increased by 33%. Finally, audience growth on Instagram increased by 4.5%, YouTube by 5.4%, and the team now have 24k TikTok followers.

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