A three-year answer to a one-year brief: Inside Bloomberg Media’s advertising playbook
By John Rahim
Bloomberg Media’s advertising revenue grew 11 percent in Europe last year, against 5 percent for the group. David Bradford, expects a similar figure for 2026, which would leave the business nearly a quarter larger than when he was promoted to the role at the start of 2025, 13 years into his time at Bloomberg. The commercial team has not grown. Asked how by Valérie Arnould, Deputy Director of WAN-IFRA’s Digital Revenue Network, at Digital Media Europe in London, Bradford’s answer was, in short, to ask his sales team to do fewer things.
The paywall turned out to be a sales tool
Bloomberg Media’s 2025 results, set out by Chief Executive Karen Saltser in February, show digital display close to flat and video up 1 percent. Bradford did not dispute the numbers, but he reads them differently. Display is still Bloomberg’s biggest advertising product and the one most advertisers buy.
What matters, he said, is what drives it, and the answer is subscriptions. When the paywall arrived in 2018 the advertising team feared for its traffic.
“If anything, it has really been to our benefit,” Bradford said.
The audience advertisers want from Bloomberg, senior executives and the wealthy, is small. Because those readers pay and log in, Bloomberg knows who they are, and that makes it a stronger sell however the advertiser buys, including through private programmatic marketplaces, which he called an important growth area.
He was candid about what followed. Audience Accelerator, the first party targeting suite launched in 2022, was, in his telling, “playing a bit of catch-up” with data the paywall had only just started to produce, and the team “got a little bit carried away” with how many audience segments it offered.
Too many segments spread the available ad space too thin and cost revenue. The product is being simplified, and it now works best in video, where Bloomberg has the audience numbers to make it pay: 72 million video views in August, Bradford said, tracking about 20 percent up year on year.
Sell the morning, not the radio station
Audio advertising grew 16 percent last year and podcasts 36 percent. Bloomberg has run a radio station since the early 1990s, and the growth there comes from changing what the sales team sells. Bloomberg’s London office has 500 journalists and a newsroom that is busy at 2am, preparing the day for people who make investment decisions before 9am.
“Rather than going out selling Bloomberg Radio, we’re selling this idea of the morning,” Bradford said. “Let’s forget about the platform.”
Bloomberg has 34 podcasts and has added a few; growth comes from getting more out of the shows it already has. His example was The Mishal Husain Show, the interview podcast launched a year ago with the former BBC Today presenter, now Editor at Large for Bloomberg Weekend, which he said shows what a well-known host can do in a crowded market.
The next move is to put every podcast on video.
That revenue will be counted as video, not audio, which is one reason Bradford thinks the 1 percent video figure understates where the money is going. Bloomberg Originals documentaries such as The Future with Hannah Fry draw large numbers of organic YouTube views per episode and bring in a younger audience of emerging leaders.
Bloomberg’s 25-minute interview with Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor, conducted by Francine Lacqua in Berlin earlier this month, is deliberately free to watch outside the paywall; Bradford said it was the longest interview Merz has given in English since taking office. That kind of reach helps the sales team as much as the newsroom.
Bloomberg’s Francine Lacqua interviews German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin in October 2026. The interview is freely available on Bloomberg’s YouTube channel.
A three-year answer to a one-year brief
Bloomberg Media reported 82 percent client retention for 2025. Bradford put the European figure slightly higher, at about 85 percent, and offered a simple explanation.
By his account, half the advertising revenue comes from financial services, where Bloomberg’s journalism is strongest, so that is where the team spends its time. Campaigns from sectors that match the audience get the results that bring advertisers back, and with a small team, chasing everything else was never an option.
The second part is the multi-year pitch. A Chief Marketing Officer sends a brief for 2026; Bloomberg replies with a plan that covers 2027 and 2028 as well.
“They’re not always expecting it,” Bradford said, and it has turned annual clients into multi-year partners. Otherwise, he said, “you have a very good year, and then you start again in January, and you suddenly lose 50 percent of your advertisers.”
The weekend is a test of the same discipline
Bloomberg Weekend is two years old this week. Subscribers who read during the week come back on Saturday and spend more time per day than they do from Monday to Friday; some new readers arrive only for the weekend. The content is lighter and more consumer-facing, which makes it tempting to chase consumer brands.
Bradford has told his team to do the opposite: offer the weekend first to the business advertisers Bloomberg already has, who need something new to keep them, and only then to luxury brands, which were always going to want this audience.
That restraint is unusual for the organisation he works in.
Bloomberg Media operates nine platforms, 34 podcasts and a newsletter portfolio, and Bradford conceded that “some might argue that we’ve got too many products” and that not all of them are sold.
He called that a lucky position, because it leaves room for ad-free subscription products without a fight over ad space. It also suits his approach. The lesson for other publishers is not to build what Bloomberg has built, but to decide, as his team did, which few things a small sales team should sell hard and which to leave alone.
About the author: John Rahim is the founder of The Media Stack.
