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This is a question I would love an answer to: There is an explosion in the English news space in TV and in print in India and till recently your competition was limited to CNN, NDTV 24X7 and CNBC. This year, we will see the emergence of two new channels, India Broadcast News and Times Now. We've also got NDTV Profit, which came sometime back. You are aware how low the rates are in this space now. How does the BBC stack up in this? How you are going to deal with rates such as these?
We've never taken the market to make our rates. We have to go and say the channel has a worth and we have positioned the rates accordingly. It doesn't say that you totally blind yourself towards what the competitors do.
You have to have a) your position on pricing and b) an integrity in the rate card. Integrity is as important as the absolute rate. The fact that an advertiser knows that he is paying the rate that the channel charges plus or minus given a trading negotiation is very important and that's the key.
Wouldn't your sales team be under pressure when the average media planner is benchmarking the rates he is getting from other channels?
We have to sell the value, the proposition. Before we get too drawn into how do we compete against $50 in the market, I think we need to ask ourselves the more basic question — what is the reason or what is the value for having BBC World in the schedule? Now, if somebody says to me "I would buy you, but I want to buy you at $50, you've got to stop there, start again because we haven't done a good enough job of selling and say, "we haven't done a good job in selling into you, why we should we be valued at a higher benchmark than that?" Across the last few years the channel has positioned itself both in terms of the product and sales offer. A few years ago, we took a broader base of advertisers than we now do. We have come a long way the time when STAR was selling BBC, and there were packages with other channels and that's why we had some strange advertisers every now and then.
When we went to market, the market saw us as corporate. You then go out and say we should be more than that, we should be wider than that.
We widened it out. We used some other programming on the channel to widen even further. As the market became more challenging and there were more offerings than just STAR News we realised that it was not sustainable us coming up with a broader positioning for the channel in India by putting in an India strip.
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That wasn't too enough, and we had to come back to a space which we could occupy as a channel, where we could discriminate, both ourselves in terms of offering and audience.
I am different than the channels that are going to sell at 50$. We need to make that point.
On documentaries and formats, you've got Discovery, History and Travel and Living, CNBC all competing with BBC. You are seeing competition the whole day. Are you looking at that space as well?
What we have done is essentially looked at our production now. For us to put in a new format on the channel and have something which was unique for the Indian offering was incredibly difficult when we were using local production companies. What we tended to do was we would take a property which was a BBC property and get it executed here. It tended to get copied. As it tended to get copied, the local channels tended to put more marketing resources in it and we were not unique anymore in that area; this happened with a succession of programmes. We went into a genre, which was in terms of reality programmes. I think the first reality programmes in India - we were really at that cutting edge. Now reality is a regular part on number of channels. We couldn't compete on that. Let's look at where we can compete. In the type of programming you've mentioned, it may appear on CNBC or Discovery. I think the programming we produce stands out and, hopefully, is better than comparable fare. Remember, a lot of BBC product goes out on Discovery.
When it comes to our business programming, we have got a huge journalistic resource that can add aspects towards that business programme which makes it not just corporate in nature but gives a more broader economic backdrop to the issues - which is often a point of differentiation which makes us have a very sustainable position in those areas.
One of the things the channel has done, it's said - is that news comes in different formats. Its not just international news; it's Business news, it's Travel news, it's IT news. That is what brings us together. It has to sit under that - that kind of interpretation.
Having said that, you have Mastermind India and the University Challenge which are extraordinary success stories. Surely on the PR front they have been successful.
On the events front the entire competition is aggressive today. I am sure India Broadcast News and Times Now are going to be more aggressive on ground and connect much more with audiences than the BBC does. We're seeing hints of BBC's connect now; this is the second event in the past two months.
Is it a pointer to what we can see -- as in more occasions where the consumer can interact with the brand?
Programmes like Mastermind were tremendously helpful in bringing in people to the channel. They were successful on a revenue platform. One of the key areas why we started such programmes is their uniqueness to increase the reach of the channel. The problem, though, is that they required a degree of effort and resource to exploit where you get an opportunity cost involved. Once we started looking at the opportunity cost of distraction of those programmes away from the core proposition and the confusion created in terms of what is this channel and where does quizzing sit on BBC world, in the market place where you've got to define the final place which you are you will occupy and it was wrong for us to have such a broad spectrum of programmes.
Individually, the projects were successful but, when you looked at the channel as a whole, the view is that they were perhaps not as appropriate today as they were two to three years ago.
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