India will remain an important market for the BBC in terms of revenues and audience

In an era of information overload and fake news, having an authentic voice is vital for brands looking to fully engage audiences and customers. BBC Global news which owns and operates BBC World News and BBC.com hosted its first Upfront events in Delhi and Mumbai.

At the BBC News Upfront 2019, which had a theme of ‘ The Power of an Authentic Voice’ saw a BBC Global News showcasing a range of its forthcoming content, partnerships and initiatives.

The line-up includes BBC News partnership with Quibi to produce original daily news show to reach the millennial audience. The show is expected to launch in April 2020 with mobile-only international news exclusively for Quibi. Also, BBC Global News will be launching two new premium collections BBC Future You and BBC Future Planet on BBC.com in 2020. Other highlights in upcoming content for BBC World News and BBC.com will also be explored, from a ‘Talking Movies Bollywood Special’ with Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan, to ‘Indian Sports Woman of the Year’ and a three-part series ‘Rhythms of India’ which explores the rich cultural history of Indian music.

Apart from that how BBC Global News will be covering upcoming editorial highlights like elections, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the T20 Cricket World Cups, also how BBC Global News is extending its programmatic audio offering to include private marketing place and programmatic guaranteed solutions for advertising partners through Acast. Also, the rollout of award-winning, propriety research tool – Science of Engagement – to all branded content deals.

exchange4media spoke to Alistair McEwan, Senior Vice President, Commercial Development, Asia & ANZ, BBC Global News; John Williams, Vice President Advertising Sales, Singapore, South & South East Asia at BBC Global News Limited and Vishal Bhatnagar, Sales Director, South Asia BBC Global News about their upcoming projects and how they see India as a market.

“This is the first time we've run Upfronts in India, we've been doing up front this is the third year, we started them in London, then we went to America and we've been growing across the Asia Pacific region. And this first year, we pulled it to India. And we're absolutely thrilled to be here. India is a really important market for us, not only commercially but also from an audience survey servicing perspective. So, we look to monetize our audiences across all of the eight Indian languages plus the English language across all services,” said McEwan when asked why they planned to conduct Upfront in India.

Williams added that the agenda of Upfront is to try and reframe how people look at the BBC. “We want people to look at the things that we have in the pipeline, about the innovation and technology and just to reiterate, how important audiences is to us as well as to our brands. In a world of fake news and misinformation and disinformation how the BBC with a number of other organizations resort stands out as a beacon of good journalism.”

While BBC Future You will focus on wellness, BBC Future Planet revolves around sustainability. Both aim to give brands access to a hyper-targeted, engaged audience whilst cutting through the fads, buzzwords and pseudoscience often associated with the subjects by offering audiences evidence, facts and authenticity.

Interestingly, the BBC is about to launch ‘Beeb’ in another 18 months. The organization is getting into the voice assistant game. It will not be a hardware device in its own right but is being designed to work on all smart speakers, TVs and mobiles.

Rather than attempt to match the wide functionality offered by Alexa and Google Assistant, Beeb will instead be focused on letting people interact with the BBC’s services.

“It is very much a BBC proprietary in-house voice assistant development. So it will reflect the underlying technology that the BBC is developing, and then we'll harness all of the content from the BBC. So perhaps, different from other voices systems that are out there in the market that focus on general information and that's available through search, we're very much about developing a voice assistant that will deliver our content to our audiences in a way that reflects the quality that we're looking for. So, the way will market that will be I imagined it will launch it initially in the UK and then it will roll out thereafter. And in fact, like all of these early-stage development projects, that are organic in nature and they did they evolve, rather than have a clearly defined sort of marketing composition at this stage. This is quite conceptual,” McEwan told us.

When asked about their forthcoming plans for India and how important is India as a market for BBC, they said that the BBC is aiming to remain relevant to this audience. And basically to keep delivering quality, impartial news which includes international, business, current affairs and scripted drama to our viewers.

“We are aware that India is a competitive market and we don’t want to rest on our laurels and expect to grow our business. We've been increasing our distribution both on TV and online in this market. So, there's definitely a hunger still for the BBC. Also, the recent investment and our editorial, an additional 300 people now work at the BBC India headquarters. It shows how important India market is for us,” Williams explained.

Bhatnagar added that going forward a lot of the content that the BBC produces is finding resonance with millennials. “And unlike the past, where it was largely restricted to English speaking audiences, we are now accessible in languages, which probably cover about 80% of our country today. I think that's where the next big surge of the audience interest is going to come in. So, India will continue to remain important in terms of audience as well as in terms of revenues as well.”