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Assert your positioning: Marketing at the heart of public service media Report written by John Newbigin, consultant and cultural entrepreneur
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REPORT
EBU Marketing Seminar
ASSERT YOUR POSITIONING: MARKETING AT THE HEART OF PUBLIC SERVICE MEDIA 19-20 November 2009 Palais des Congrès, Marrakech, Morocco
Contact:
Nathalie Cordonnier Project Manager EBU TRAINING Tel: +41 22 717 21 48 E‐mail: cordonnier@ebu.ch www.ebu.ch/training
© EBU TRAINING/John Newbigin
January 2010
All pictures extracted from speakers’ presentations.
EBU Marketing Seminar
ASSERT YOUR POSITIONING: MARKETING AT THE HEART OF PUBLIC SERVICE MEDIA
19-20 November 2009
Palais des Congrès, Marrakech, Morocco
REPORT INTRODUCTION In his welcome to the EBU/UER and to the participants, Abdel el‐Fakir of SNRT reminded us that our business is all about people – and that all of us are wrestling with similar big questions about how to define, deliver and promote public value in all we do.
At a time when the preoccupation of many media professionals is to understand the changes in our industry that are being driven by technology, we were surely right to hold a seminar that focused almost exclusively on people. If we are to successfully ‘assert our position’ as the seminar title proposed, we need to understand who are our audiences; to construct a clearer picture of who they are and what they want from public service broadcasting; and to better understand the relationship between ‘them’ as the audience and ‘us’ as broadcasters.
To focus on such issues is to lead quickly to a discussion of ‘impact’ a term that, in a time of few channels and restricted bandwidth, was often understood to be a synonym for ratings. But today’s multi‐channel, multi‐platform world is also a multi‐audience world and demands more subtle and sophisticated tools of measurement than the blunt instrument of old‐fashioned ratings. It also demands a more thoughtful analysis of what constitutes public service broadcasting. The long lists of quotas, genres and hours that have been the traditional definitions of public service broadcasting set out by governments no longer do the job. What do we now mean by the phrase ‘public service broadcasting? … or should we now be talking of ‘public service media’? … or simply ‘public value’?
Over the course of two days we covered the waterfront on these debates, from the specific lessons to be gleaned from particular marketing campaigns to the broadest discussion of what is the point of what we do in the twenty‐first century.
WHO ARE OUR AUDIENCES?
Appropriately enough, many of these issues were elucidated by the very first presentation from Bruno Deblander and Laurence Lorie of RTBF. They sought to place their organisation’s output in the larger context of all French language media in Belgium. Bruno flagged up one of the most consistent themes of the seminar when he told us that RTBF was thinking about how to address one very particular audience – its own staff, what he called “our internal public”. In various forms, this issue returned again and again – do the marketing and editorial departments understand each other? Do they agree? Do most programme makers and commissioners believe in the values of public service that marketing departments are seeking to present to audiences and stakeholders? Laurence showed us a slide setting out the mass of detailed targets and requirements that in regulatory terms define the public service output of her channel. But, as it is for most PSBs, this is a legacy of decades of debate and discussion that not only fails to capture the true spirit and ambition of public service broadcasting, but sometimes actively impedes its imaginative delivery in today’s fluid and competitive market place.
Les intégrés
Utilisation des media =
s’affirmer et se distinguer
Utilisation des media = échangeravec le monde extérieur pour
enrichir sa propre réalité
Media =
fenêtre sur le monde
Utilisation des media =Filtrer le monde extérieur pour
conforter sa propre réalité
Utilisation des media =
montrer son appartenanceau groupe et
s’intégrer
Les stratégies motivationnellesTerritoires de La Une et La Deux
Les explorateurs
Les élitistes
Les pondérés
Les relax
Les insécurisés
(available in French only)
Lotta Loosme explained how the Swedish broadcaster SVT had broken its audience down into eight clearly defined and distinguishable segments (from A to H, as per the slide here below).
This more nuanced portrait of their audience was helping programme makers and commissioners focus their output to cater more accurately for the needs and expectations of viewers ‐ but it had also produced other, unexpected, benefits for the channel. It enabled them to realise that they did not have to attempt to reach all the audience all the time (a perspective that was reflected later in a presentation from BBC3) and it had highlighted the extent to which their own staff were not in any way representative of the audience they were seeking to reach. SVT discovered that almost half of their one hundred senior staff belonged to just one of their eight audience segments; a segment which, statistically, represented no more than 9% of the Swedish population. This raised a disturbing question; – rather than making programmes that appealed to the tastes and interests of their diverse national community, was SVT only meeting the needs of a small cross‐section of the public by making programmes that reflected the values and aspirations of their own staff, believing that in doing so they did in fact represent the whole country?
80
18
35
50
60
80
35
50
60
Adventurous & Investigative
Self expression &
Image
Stability & Tradition
Con
scio
usne
ss&
Dep
th
SVT audience compass
These three powerful presentations were followed by a question and answer session chaired by Sway Media’s Martin Poole. There was a strong consensus from the whole panel:‐ we need to be much more attuned to the fact that we have a variety of different audiences; we must become much more sophisticated in how we find out who they are and what they want; we need to be aware of our ‘internal audience’ – our colleagues – and guard against the delusion that they alone can be arbiters of what a much more varied external audience wants and expects. In a nutshell, we can no longer regard our audiences as passive consumers – we need to engage with them. “Don’t underestimate your audience” warned Lotta.
And perhaps we should add – ‘don’t overestimate your own understanding of what your audiences really want’! Martin finished with the question – do we need a fresh vision for public service media? And, if so, how are we to think through the re‐branding that will be needed?
Wim Möllman from SF in Switzerland showed us how his organisation had used Sinus Milieus techniques to undertake a similar exercise to that undertaken by Lotta and her colleagues. By analysing the values of its audience in terms of their personal interests ‐ work, family, income and leisure pursuits ‐ rather than the conventional broadcast categories of age groups, and by then cross‐referencing this data with a broader category of individual outlook (‘traditional’, ‘modern’, ‘open to change’) SF had segmented its viewers into quite distinct groups as a useful aid to planning programme output, scheduling and marketing.
The consequences of thinking about audience in these segmented terms was then explored by Anna Priest from the UK’s BBC3 and Clare Phillips of Red Bee Media who had worked with BBC staff in refining and redefining the channel’s audience profile. They had a simple proposition; ‐ in a world of expanding viewer choice broadcasters must re‐balance the equation between variety of output and focus. They summed this up with the statement “Clarity means sacrifice”. Applied to BBC3’s output this approach had meant, in essence, that the channel focused on the 80% it did best and abandoned the remaining 20%. In re‐thinking BBC3’s position they had gone in the opposite direction to much current marketing and had focused on the channel brand rather than individual programme brands. Their argument was that when the Electronic Programme Guide offers viewers an abundance of choices, there is no need for individual channels to do the same. The key issue then becomes having a
distinct channel brand, able to give audiences an expectation of what individual programmes on that channel will be like.
Further presentations explored other initiatives that had helped new thinking in channel branding. Olivia Olivi and Eglantine Dupuis told us about ARTE’s highly successful summer seasons which had not only succeeded in its primary purpose of “rejuvenating the image of the channel” but had also “re‐invigorated the audience” – a valuable public service by any reckoning! The campaign had been run on every possible platform and had a strong real‐world presence with public events and ‘give‐aways’ such as T‐shirts. The ‘summers’ had been very effective in increasing the channel’s audiences but also in building the strength and distinctiveness of its brand.
Rebecka Ioannidis and Johan Ljungstrom of SR gave us a presentation of how they had taken a radio station that, although well respected and well known, lacked, in their words, “energy, modernity and joy”. Research had shown that more or less their entire target audience used online services and so they had embraced the idea of promoting access to radio online and particularly while travelling to and from work, with the slogan “The fastest way to get to work”. Amongst other outcomes of the campaign had been a 35% increase in visitors to the SR website.
Some of these issues were re‐visited at the end of the seminar in a series of break‐out workshops, one of which considered the question ’How to build a killer brand’. Martin Poole and Peter Claes from VRT used the example of Radio Romania as an organisation that had re‐thought its identity, but had done so by undertaking a rigorous review of its mission and brand values. They then invited participants at the session to think about their own organisation’s brand values and the relationship between brand values and brand identity. The essential points to emerge from the session re‐enforced much of what had gone on during the seminar;‐ be prepared to sacrifice for the sake of clarity; choose the words you use to describe your brand values with great care; think ahead; don’t try to do everything at once – better to focus on one challenge a year; and, most of all, never forget that your channel’s brand is what the audience – not you ‐ perceive it to be.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY ‘PUBLIC SERVICE’?
Here is a debate that will continue for as long as broadcasting continues! In giving their presentations, several of our speakers referred to that well‐established mantra that almost every public service broadcaster has written into its constitution – to inform, educate and entertain. When broadcasting was a relatively simple one‐way flow from studio to home, these three pillars were easy enough to recognise and describe. But as communication technologies continue to converge seamlessly we find ourselves moving from the term ‘public service broadcasting’ to ‘public service media’ and, finally perhaps, in a society in which media is becoming all‐pervasive, to ‘public service’ or ‘public value’. Our speakers and panellists offered a variety of alternative visions.
Risto Vuorensola’s view of the central task for Finland’s YLE was to “influence society” and he gave us examples of a public service campaign YLE had undertaken to reduce bicycle thefts in Helsinki. Risto also suggested that one of the important tasks for public service media now and in the future will be to constantly ask the question “Do we have any alternatives to Microsoft?” – in other words, to actively ensure that there is always publicly owned space in the online world and that access to it is not completely controlled by a few giant commercial bodies.
How can we develop the co-operation between TV and the internet..
How can we make the internet users to get interested in television content…
How can we make the internet and TV content as a consistent package ..
CONTENT IS - MARKETING - IS CONTENT
http://yle.fi/elavaarkisto/T0222271x.mpg
Jonathan Simon from the UK’s Channel 4 thought one of the central questions for public service broadcasters was how to keep people watching serious quality content when the airwaves are full of easy, undemanding viewing.
For RTBF, perhaps particularly mindful of its role as a French language station in a multilingual society, original production was as important a part of its public service as the obligation to inform, educate and entertain. So was it with ARTE, whose concern was how to rejuvenate its image and bring more dynamism to the channel without undermining the positive criteria of the channel, trust and quality.
Peter Claes from the Belgian station VRT considered the defining values for public service media as being “quality, sustainability and the community spirit”. His slogan for VRT was “by everyone, for everyone, on all platforms, free of commercial and political influences.”
The common theme to many of these definitions and case studies is that, increasingly, the role of public service media is seen as being not simply to reflect the world to its audiences but to play a part in shaping it – challenging, inspiring, catalysing public actions, whether the outcome can be measured in greater attendance at art galleries, a more active engagement by citizens with issues of public concern ‐ or a very specific outcome such as fewer bicycles being stolen.
This, in turn, took us straight back to the two other questions that dominated the seminar, first; ‐ how can we formulate practical measures of success if our impact is to be gauged by changes in society rather than simply the number of eyeballs watching our programmes? A second question, perhaps the core question, is how do we describe and explain these larger social purposes – not just to our audiences but to our colleagues who commission, make and cost our output and who may be, in varying degrees, sceptical of such apparently ephemeral measures of value.
Underlying all these discussions is the recognition that our audiences are changing; people’s view of media and how they interact with it is in a state of rapid flux. At every turn this poses difficult questions for long‐established public broadcasters and two of our contributors touched on what is perhaps the most sensitive question of all;‐ impartiality. If comprehensive news provision lies at the heart of all public service media, then impartiality is the foundation on which all public service news rests. But Peter Cowley from Endemol pointed out that, used to an unprecedented level of interaction and engagement with media, “people now believe what their
friends say more than what the TV news says”. Chris Gottlieb took up this theme in a presentation describing how the BBC had re‐vamped some of its news coverage in an attempt to keep more viewers informed about domestic and international news, even if they would not normally choose to watch a news programme. Brief 90‐second news bulletins had been dropped into the gaps between popular programmes, each one featuring a news reader but without the normal paraphernalia of a TV news studio. The selected items had been chosen on the same basis as the content of the established mainstream BBC news programmes – the range of issues should be serious, important and wide‐ranging;‐ this was not celebrity or gossip‐dominated ‘news lite’. Extensive market research had revealed a number of common responses, none of them very surprising, for example; the perception that news programmes were boring; that they focused on nothing but bad news and disasters; and that they assumed a high level of engagement from their audiences – many viewers found the news quite simply incomprehensible. One of the BBC research respondents had said of the news “I don’t even know what they’re talking about.” But the same respondents had some rather more surprising observations;‐ they wanted to know why the news readers never offered their own views of what they were reporting. Instead, they seemed to have no opinions about anything and that made them both boring and, perhaps slightly suspect – why had they been hired to read the news if they had no opinions of their own?
The good news: news matters
• N&CA have important roles to play for this audience - They like news… it’s called ‘What’s going on’
• The BBC brand brings a guarantee of trust, accuracy & authority, which they value
Here is a question of genuinely momentous significance for the whole of European broadcasting;‐ how can public service media maintain its vital core function of presenting not just news but impartial news when audiences, especially younger audiences, seem to regard impartiality with mounting scepticism? To abandon
impartiality cannot be the answer; the degradation and manipulation of news on some of the big US radio networks demonstrates what lies down that road. But to find ways of winning and retaining audiences, especially at a time when traditional newsgathering is becoming almost prohibitively expensive, will demand all our imagination and skill.
Some of these topics fed through to another of the workshop session at the end of the seminar:‐ ‘Public service broadcasting has no future’. Unsurprisingly, given who we are, the consensus was that it did have a future! But it’s not as simple as it was. So far as the audience is concerned ‘public service’ is a term to describe particular content, not a whole channel; and on that basis there is a huge – indeed a growing volume of public service content to be found on every platform. We discussed the possible benefits of a single hi‐profile platform where the best of it might be grouped together – not You‐tube but perhaps EBU‐tube?
IMPACT AND REACH
Measuring public service broadcasting has always been fraught with difficulty. ‘Impact’ and ‘reach’ are two popular terms but what do they mean? Of course for a generalist public service channel reach has been, and continues to be, important. But is its importance declining in a multi‐channel world in which audiences are much more fragmented? In any case, measuring reach may do no more than provide some false comfort in a climate of declining ratings – to reach a broad spread of the population may be valuable, but is not the same thing as reaching a large number of the population; the two must be presented in some kind of balance with each other.
Impact is another tricky word, not least because it is open to such subjective interpretation. Impact used to mean much the same as ratings – the bigger the audience the bigger the impact in a world of restricted channels. Now, in a world in which audiences are more segmented it becomes important to know what impact a particular programme or series may have had on someone’s life away from the TV. Jonathon Simon explained how the UK’s Channel 4 approached this issue with focus groups and detailed market research that invited viewers to say whether programmes had made them see the world differently. In his view, the ever‐expanding range of channels had the effect of making audiences lazy. Given a choice between ‘easy viewing’ and a more challenging option, viewers were more likely to turn away form the more demanding programme – an option that was not so readily available in a time of channel scarcity and much greater market dominance by public service broadcasting. However, one piece of research showed that, comparing like for like, Channel 4’s original commissioned programmes had won bigger audiences and enjoyed greater impact than similar acquired programmes.
For Channel 4 this vindicated their commitment to ‘distinctiveness’ as one of the core qualities they aimed for in original programming – a good lesson for public service broadcasters everywhere and a view echoed by Riso Vuorensola who reminded us that “content is marketing”.
New approach to public valueChannel 4 evolving from “public service channel to public service network”
“Obligation to explain to viewers and stakeholders not only what we are doing but why”
New “basket of measures” to reflect evolving role of Channel 4 and to provide enhanced accountability
Published as part of 2008 Annual Report
Jonathan explored some of these issues in more depth in his workshop on ‘Audience Measurement: does it help?’ There was a recognition that no single ‘killer metric’ exists, or is likely to, that will prove to be an unarguable and durable measure of public service value. But it is clear that qualitative research, typically conducted in focus groups, has an increasingly important role to play in helping us define public service and public value in the new world. On a very practical note, it was pointed out that having a simple and very distinctive, rather than generic title for content makes it much easier to track its impact online using measures such as google analytics or buzz metrics. And, finally, someone drew attention to the fact that Nokia has one of the most sophisticated approaches to identifying audience segmentation. Perhaps a representative of the company should be invited to a future seminar?
Two prominent figures form the commercial media world, Peter Cowley of Endemol and Nicole Yershon from the global advertising agency Ogilvy reminded us that anyone and everyone working in media today is struggling to come to terms with the pace of change. Peter identified the four big issues with which Endemol was most concerned as ‐ technology changes, audience behaviour changes, the search for new business models and what he called ‘the democratisation of production’. He emphasised the message we had already heard in several of the presentations – the replacement of ‘breadth’ as a key value of traditional broadcasting channels with
‘focus’ as the key value in a crowded marketplace. Peter expressed it as “broadcasters who understand that they can’t do everything on every platform will be the winners”.
Peter’s messages were re‐enforced by Nicole Yershon. Speaking of her role as the director and animator of an ideas and technology lab at Ogilvy, she was aware of the danger of being seduced by the possibilities of new technology when the really difficult question is how to make the transition from a great idea to a great revenue‐generating idea; moving from ‘thinking’ to ‘doing’ as she put it.
She, too. echoed several of the other presentations when she told us she felt some of her most intractable communication problems were internal; yet another reminder that there is little value in attempting to market public service values to audiences if they have not been bought and fully understood by the internal audience – our colleagues.
SO … HOW DO WE ‘ASSERT OUR POSITIONING’? At the end of the seminar it was impossible not to have been impressed by the imagination and energy with which public service broadcasters are seeking new ways to understand the needs, wants and expectations of their audiences, to find new ways of engaging with them, and to re‐think what public value means and how it can be expressed in societies where media is all‐pervasive and highly interactive.
The relation: government - PSB
Government
PSB
Added valueReachAV offer
Real Brands (PV)
Market research
Production
I.
II.
III.
In presentations, workshops and in the question and answer sessions over the two days, the point was frequently made that we need a fresh vision for public service. That’s true. And one of the ways to do it must surely be to continue holding seminars like this, in which good practice can be shared, in which values can be debated and in which the language and the actions by which public service broadcasters assert their position in the market can be tested and refined.
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