Adgully Exclusive | India an exciting place for digital medium: BBC's Phu Truong

When the British Broadcasting Company was founded on 18 October 1922, their idea was to give an unbiased view of affairs, one which stimulate its audience.

Since then BBC, as it is called, has been the benchmark of journalism that everyone strives for.

The online medium of the BBC has been a roaring success. Launched as BBC Online first, it was then renamed as bbc.co.uk, before it was rebranded back as BBC Online. With more than two million page views a day, it's safe to say that the BBC is Europe's most popular content-based site. According to Alexa's TrafficRank system, in July 2008 BBC Online was the 27th most popular English Language website in the world, and the 46th most popular overall.

In order to enhance its reach, BBC re-launched its award-winning News site www.bbc.com/news. In this, it has introduced new functionality and design and is ramping up its coverage of sport, travel, business and technology.

BBC.com has achieved 41% growth in the last financial year (ending March 31, 2010) and unique users have grown from 50 to 54m a month outside of the UK.

The redesign sees an overhaul of the layout with including better use of video and images, more prominent labelling and easier ways to share stories with others.

So what was the need to redesign the website?

Phu Truong, Director, Digital Sales and Commercial Development, BBC.com (BBC Worldwide) feels the idea behind redesigning the website was to produce a lot more news content with the website.

"We tried to read and understand the need and the market, in terms of what they want and what they are looking for. As per the needs we designed the new look for bbc.com," he explains in an exclusive interaction with Adgully.

"The new design has two important elements, one is a better navigation and second is the videos that go on the site, and they will be more prominent. We are looking forward to produce a lot more news content with the new site," he adds.

One of the enhanced features of the website is that it has a cleaner design. Unlike the earlier website, it has space for more stories. "The special features are that the website will have a cleaner design, more space for stories to be shown above the scroll. Navigation of videos is lot more easily and the new site will enable easy sharing of the links," explains Truong, who has been given the task to lead the strategy, direction and growth of BBC.com.

With the digital medium making its mark globally and with India slowly coming to terms with the digital form, Truong finds India critical in their scheme of things.

"India is really an exciting place for digital medium. When I say digital medium I mean not just in terms of mobile but other digital platforms too. India is on the verge of entering the world of 3G and it is also believed that India will be one of the first few countries to have 4G technologies as well.

"India is critical in our development, not only in the Asia Pacific region but also in terms of our worldwide reach. Right now bbc.com has 1.3million Indian users. Indian market is crucial because there is an appetite and there is a market for digital media," he says.

"Post our new addition, which is a critical market addition for us we will be planning for our next addition, and India, is definitely on the radar for that. India has been an important market because it has the cultural link, language link and there is a good population there. We have had around 1.3million users there, and if we look at the market there a little better and launch it in a better way we can get more users for the site," he adds.

And for that Truong knows that branding will be the key.

"Branding is the major advertising activity. Advertisers come to us because they trust for our quality. We execute the ads in a better way. Globally our advertisers are mostly from travel, business, financial and technology sectors. From Indian advertisers, tourism is one of our largest advertisers; other advertisers include Suzlon, HSBC, Spice Jet and TCS," he says

"Besides we are in the right environment, targeting the right people and that's what branding is all about. Moreover most of our ad units are larger, they are impactful and they have a lot of room for real branding. With the redesign we have an entire new advertiser addition, some of them take the full screen and they will look more impactful," he explains.

Truong feels that tie-ups with various mobile companies has extended their reach, helping them to grow bigger and better. "BBC has a tie up with various mobile companies; except for that BBC has a customized application on Apple iPad. From the day iPad was launched, BBC has had an application on it and it has enhanced our global reach.

"Besides BBC apps have been downloaded million times all over the world, which is a phenomenal number. It's a great app and there commercial opportunities in it as well," he says.

Besides this, BBC is soon planning to launch a travel section. For this, they have joined hands with Lonely Planet, which would help them to have we will have content on travel.

"So far we don't have a specific travel section, so we are launching BBC Travel this summer. It would help us to offer the best of travel and the best of news. The section will be beneficial for our users as it will add value to their experience. You see people who are reading from the BBC website are curious, they are interested and have opinions, so we want to offer something more to them," Truong says.

"Now what we are doing with BBC Travel is we are building a travel section in partnership with Lonely Planet, which means that we will have content on travel from people who have looked at various parts of the world quite differently from what has been said in the travel guide books. BBC Travel is going to be a section within the site bbc.com and will help in adding value to our content," he adds.

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