BBC, Diet Coke Test RSS As Advertising Medium.

THE BBC NEXT WEEK plans to use RSS to spike its online ads with news headlines, joining others, including Diet Coke and Nasdaq, that have tapped the emerging medium.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a Web syndication technology that lets users get snippets and headlines from their favorite sites delivered to one place.

Starting next week, BBC banner ads will run as headlines to attract Web surfers. The headlines will be tailored to various sites. For instance, entertainment sites will carry BBC lifestyle story headlines, while those on NYTimes.com and WashingtonPost.com will include political and world news.

The campaign is a small example of a larger effort to make Internet advertising more inviting with useful bits of content tailored to consumer interests, delivered wherever consumers are. News sites, which have been early adopters of Web feed syndication, have a ready supply of content to dynamically place in ad units, but other brands are joining in the hopes of warding off "banner blindness" and building deeper user engagement.

"Simply having a good message isn't good enough," said Alan Booth, controller of marketing at the BBC. "We feel they're more likely to click through on headlines than if we just had a great slogan or piece of creative."

For the six-month campaign, Agency Republic, London, is targeting "inquisitives," the at-work audience that tends to dip in and out of news stories throughout the day. In one ad, tagged "news for a nonstop world," a real-time feed of the latest BBCNews.com headlines orbits a globe. A second execution for lifestyle sites has headlines and the opening sentence of entertainment stories over a cup of steaming coffee.

Gavin Marshall, business director of the BBC account at Agency Republic, said the campaign is "based on using news to sell the news. It made absolutely no sense not to use RSS feeds to deliver against that strategy."

BBC is not alone. CNN put RSS in ad units to promote its free Web video service launch in June. Agency.com piped in headlines of new videos when they were available on CNN.com.

Since Web feeds are targeted to specific interests, they open the possibility of turning ad units into branded-content syndication services, according to agency executives. Reuters has worked with Nasdaq and Coca-Cola for campaigns that package RSS feeds of its news stories into ad units tailored for those brands' audiences. Nasdaq's ads, for instance, carry finance and business headlines.

In a six-month campaign that began last month, Reuters helped create banner ads for Diet Coke that display a real-time customized feed of "feel-good" stories selected by a Reuters editor. Clicking on the headlines takes users to an article page in a branded Diet Coke area on Reuters.com. They can also receive the RSS feed on their cell phones or add it to their feed reader, and the Diet Coke-branded feed has even run on the Reuters sign in New York's Times Square.

PHOTO (COLOR): Lite news: Diet Coke tapped RSS this year.

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By Brian Morrissey