Keeping Up With Consumer Patterns

BBC has a new strategy for the India market. Targeting the Indian regional space in a big way, it is planning to build its largest media facility in India outside of the UK. On a recent visit to India, BBC Global News CEO JIM EGAN spoke to RUHAIL AMIN about the importance of the Indian market, BBC’s foray into new regional languages and more

- Ruhail Amin

Could you tell us about BBC’s transformation from a traditional to a digital-savvy entity?

If you look at it inside out, it has not been easy. It meant talking to people who have done radio and TV all their professional life and convincing them about the need for change. However, if you look at it from outside-in, it’s pretty much simpler because the audience has developed and changed very quickly. So what we needed to do was to keep what was precious and important such as the radio and the TV and build on the digital capability.

Incidentally, this year BBC.com celebrated its 20th anniversary. During the last decade, we saw dramatic changes everywhere in the world in terms of Internet and the role of mobile devices. I think people have not dropped platforms in favour of the other. What we did was to keep what is precious about platforms such as TV and build its digital capability. So it has been a more of a balanced portfolio kind of approach. In general, more than 50 per cent of our traffic is on mobile devices and in some markets more than three quarters. In the last five years, it has been the role of social media, which has had the biggest impact. I think, at this stage, most publishers are still trying to figure out their relationship with social media. From a news gathering perspective, it’s a phenomenal platform, but I think from a commercial point of view, we don’t have things figured out yet. We see a large amount of growth in advertising going towards digital platform players and a lot of that advertising is around content that media publishers are producing. So the audience value of social media is pretty much proven, but the commercial case is still lesser at this stage.