BBC

The Challenge

BBC News at Ten has a wide reach - lots of people watch it occasionally, but only a quarter of its viewers are regular viewers. The challenge was to get occasional viewers to tune in regularly.

The Solution

The Editoral Team at BBC News knew that people are more likely to watch the news - and more likely to watch the BBC - when they think there’s a big story. Our strategy, therefore, was to give viewers the sense that that night’s news was unmissable.

In order to accomplish this, we needed to change the way that the News department promoted its stories for the evening news. We recommended that the team follows two key principles. First, to promote only one story, rather than the two or three headlines that many of BBC News at Ten’s competitors push. By focusing on one key headline, viewers have a sense that there is a key story that needs to be watched. The second principle is to show that the story, which may have been running in news headlines across different media throughout the day, is more complex than our viewers might think.

We created a three-part template for the Editorial team to help them to accomplish this. First, the promotion shows the news anchor reading the headline. Secondly, the piece shows the BBC in the field, getting close up to the information. And thirdly, the promo reveals a senior reporter or analyst asking a question which implies the broader relevance or complexity of the issue.

Working with BBC marketing, we held workshops with the News Editorial team in order to involve them in the strategy and to help them to differentiate between creating a news package and creating a 30” piece of advertising that promotes that news package.