This team impressed the jury by their success at building audience engagement and audience numbers – through their successful use of TikTok, through upskilling the team in creating video, and by capturing the zeitgeist with their focus on the cost-of-living crisis.

How does an editorial team working for a brand with a 34-year heritage ensure it retains its number one in market status, increases its revenue, grow its subscriptions, and break page view records?

The editorial team working across BBC Good Food and olive continue to lead the field in digital publishing, growing its audience and its reputation throughout challenging and changing times. Working across print and digital, the team have adapted and overcome challenges, and through incredible resilience, teamworking and creativity, delivered outstanding growth, enhanced the brand and reputation, and added much needed joy to the lives of their audience.

BBC Good Food is the UK’s biggest and most trusted food media brand with the largest brand reach of any UK magazine and an astonishing 1.2 billion page-views on our website. In 2022 their subscriptions business grew to record volumes, and they built new and accelerated existing revenue streams and developed editorial initiatives that supported the nation through the toughest of years.

Throughout 2022 with the continuing cycle of bad news, economic uncertainty and spiralling food and gas costs, bbcgoodfood.com remained pivotal to people’s lives, encouraging the nation to cook and plan in new ways, upskill and cut food waste.

The highly innovative editorial team had another year of pivoting in an increasingly uncertain economic landscape. They launched an exclusive content plan for the subscription GF app, 10X'd video content and created a new content vertical: Cook Smart, in response to rapidly rising food prices and energy bills.

For Cook Smart, they re-costed over 300 budget recipes and over 100 new pieces of digital content were commissioned. Cook Smart runs across all our brand touchpoints, and we 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 10X video. The digital editorial team have now all completed training that enables them to confidently shoot and edit video, to put them at the forefront of the media's changing landscape and they are now creating an average of 50 pieces of new video content every month. A multi-format use was adopted that also allowed the team to deliver cut-down versions for all social media, including a brand new TikTok channel. This was a key strategic move to seek new audiences and help them to discover the team’s content in the places where they look for inspiration and support, whether that's podcasts, social media posts, video or practical meal plans to help time and budget-conscious users eat flavour packed, nutritious food every day.

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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