BBC Audiences: AI-Powered Semiotics at Scale

BBC Food carried strong brand credibility, but untapped opportunity still existed with social media, ranking only 6th among brand accounts for engagement. The social food landscape had shifted toward personality, story, and lifestyle content, an area BBC Food had yet to tap into, while budget and timelines ruled out traditional large-scale qualitative research.

Verve addressed this through AI-powered semiotics at scale, combined with human cultural expertise. Around 5,000 Instagram images were analysed via Verve's proprietary Maven platform, work that would have taken months manually was completed in two weeks, clustering content into 26 semiotic themes and 8 broader nets. Video content was deliberately handled differently: 300 Instagram Reels were manually coded by semioticians, since layered sonic and cultural cues demanded human interpretation AI couldn't reliably capture. This hybrid approach revealed that BBC Food had zero presence in the highest-engaging "Lifestyle & Chef Stories" content and read as corporate rather than relatable. Findings were translated into category-specific creative rulebooks covering presentation, sensory cues, and visual staging.

The impact was substantial. Following the rulebooks' rollout, BBC Food achieved an 18.6% year-on-year uplift in video views, with Instagram growing 19.7%. Content leaning into freshness, comfort, and emotionally resonant storytelling directly reflected the semiotic signals identified. Strategically, BBC Food significantly expanded creator collaborations, addressing its biggest gap: absence from personality-led content. The methodology has since scaled across nine further BBC content categories, including Weather, Comedy, and Children's, becoming an embedded, evolving resource across the BBC's content planning process.

Shortlisted for the ESOMAR Breakthrough Research Methodology Award