Testing the waters discovering hidden offshore demand for TV programming

Case study

A case study from
The Economist
Intelligence Unit

BBC Worldwide
Testing the waters: discovering hidden offshore demand for TV
programming
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is the world’s second-largest broadcaster, renowned for highquality news and entertainment. Its global commercial subsidiary, BBC Worldwide, has harnessed the power of
advanced data analytics to bring the venerable broadcaster’s brands to lucrative—and previously unexplored—
new markets.

A world-class brand seeks a worldwide market

“To understand
consumption these
days, we need new
data systems, new
processes, new
tools and new
metrics.”
David Boyle,
Executive Vice President of
Insight at BBC Worldwide

The BBC’s world-renowned programming is provided without advertisements, financed by an annual
television licence fee. BBC Worldwide, the broadcaster’s commercial arm responsible for selling BBC
programmes internationally, generates about one-quarter of all BBC income. Realising that traditional
television audience ratings are an incomplete and sometimes backward-looking measure of underlying
demand for content, BBC Worldwide has turned to advanced data analytics to identify new markets and to

seek out new niches in existing ones. The Corporation’s Insight team has worked with external partners to
leverage a diverse array of data sources and technologies. They interpret this information to provide
insights into market-specific viewer demand levels all over the world and to identify fresh opportunities to
meet consumer needs.

New tools for a new age
Television may be experiencing a new golden age, but its mechanisms for audience measurement are often
badly out of date. Traditional ratings services, the go-to barometer of viewership in North America, are
focused on conventional TV channels and cannot track viewers effectively in today’s fragmented media
landscape. “The multibillion dollar body of TV measurement data is both currency and a sacred cow for the
whole industry, and it’s becoming less relevant every day,” says David Boyle, Executive Vice President of
Insight at BBC Worldwide. “To understand consumption these days, we need new data systems, new
processes, new tools and new metrics.”

Pirates and start-ups
The firm has met this challenge by integrating every data source that can reveal underlying demand,
including social media interactions, YouTube views, Wikipedia engagement and, perhaps the most
unexpected source of insight, P2P piracy data. “We think of [piracy] as a signal of demand for our content,”
explains Mr Boyle. “Taken together, the amount of data from these sources is absolutely massive and very
granular.”
BBC Worldwide boasts a highly capable internal analytics team, but it was already tasked with
responsibilities for gathering data, interpreting and visualising it, and disseminating the resulting

© The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited 2015


Case study

knowledge across the organisation. So Mr Boyle turned to external partners to make sense of the numbers.
“We rely on many different analytics partners, because we’ve found that the data science and computing

tasks are so big and complex that it doesn’t make sense to build a system ourselves,” says Mr Boyle. “It’s a
new thing for us—it’s not how we’ve handled things in the past—but so far it’s been really wonderful.”

Breaking new ground
What these partnerships accomplish is simple in concept but complex in execution. Through deep-dive
analysis of disparate data sources, they provide BBC Worldwide with a clear picture of demand levels for
every piece of content in dozens of markets around the world. The process completely bypasses traditional
ratings systems by distilling innumerable inputs into actionable outputs. The resulting insights are
unprecedented both in their accessibility to decision-makers and in the depth of understanding they
provide. According to Mr Boyle, the process is both fascinating and “completely groundbreaking”.

Moving from enthusiasm to action

BBC Worldwide’s
advanced analytics
strategies have paid
off with a series of
success stories.

Realising the potential of advanced analytics to reveal new markets was not without its challenges.
Successfully moving an initiative out of the boardroom and into the analytical trenches is never easy, and
Mr Boyle cautions against empty enthusiasm. “It’s easy to impress with flashy visualisations and a handful
of identified business opportunities,” he warns, “but keeping up that energy from the initial meeting all
the way through to business action can be a real challenge.”
For BBC Worldwide, clarity of purpose has been the key to addressing this challenge. This means keeping a
strong focus on the business challenges being addressed and asking very specific questions that can be
answered through advanced analytics. “You absolutely have to start at the business problem and that’s the
core of what my team does,” Mr Boyle says. “We’ll go see what data we need to solve that problem and try
to provide a long-lasting and global self-service solution. We have about fifteen business problems that we
actively support right now.”

Paging the Doctor
BBC Worldwide’s advanced analytics strategies have paid off with a series of success stories. One was
discovering the appetite of television viewers in South Korea for the adventures of the time-travelling
Doctor Who. Revenue figures for the brand suggested the opportunities in the region were minimal. But the
analytics told a different story. High piracy levels for new episodes revealed huge underlying demand and a
sizeable fan base for the 50-year-old show. This pointed to a new source of revenue if this demand could be
monetised by driving it to commercial channels. “We took the cast [of Doctor Who] to South Korea as part of
a global publicity and fan tour,” Mr Boyle recalls. “The hall we booked had 4,000 seats available, but tens
of thousands of people applied for tickets within a few minutes of them becoming available.”
The traditional audience measurement tools had not indicated this market potential because they were not
designed to look at the relevant data. But now the model is in a state of transformation, thanks largely to
analytics-driven insights. “We’re doing the same analysis now for many of our other brands and we’re
seeing new opportunities everywhere,” says Mr Boyle. “We’re very excited about the possibilities.”

© The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited 2015