Adgully Exclusive | Betting big on new media: BBC Worldwide's Seema Mohapatra

Having won the Queen's Award for Enterprise, an esteemed recognition for international trade in April 2009, BBC Worldwide has been a growing entity. It comprises of six core businesses, which includes Channels, Content & Production, Sales & Distribution, BBC Magazines, Home Entertainment and Global Brands.

Seema Mohapatra, Head of Advertising Sales- India, BBC Worldwide, speaks to Adgully about the unit's growing interest amongst the advertsing fraternity and the steady growth of the unit.

Talking about the growing business on the digital front with a powerful offering like bbc.com, Mohapatra says, "I think it is one of the most fantastic offering from our stable in the market. We believe that our end users are going across platforms and it doesnt matter which screen he utilises to watch the news on. But our viewers do go to bbc.com for more specialised news on various genres. We have had an amazing response from advertisers both in terms of Indian advertisers looking for exposure on the Indian sub-category but also advertisers who want to reach out to a global auidience. We have got a lot of traction in the Indian market, in fact we currently have over 15-17 million page views every month."

IT, Telecom, Auto, Travel and Real Estate are some of the major categories of advertisers currently on bbc.com. "What is interesting is other publishers are also utilising our ad space to further their reach and subscriptions," she adds.

Earlier this year BBC Worldwide launched BBC Travel on bbc.com which is powered by Lonely Planet and during the travel seasons like October, November and December the section had around 11 airlines advertising. "The way I look at it, bbc.com and BBC World News have done pretty well this year. We are going to carry a lot of write up on the Cricket World Cup 2011 on our website. And we at BBC have always got amazing output on sports and the Cricket World Cup 2011 coverage will include extended inetractions on a virtually enabled platform and through blogs," Mohapatra pointed out.

When asked about the video content on bbc.com and its popularity in India, Mohapatra says, "Our offering video-content which includes content across genres is a famous offering around the world. But in India, due to the broadband connectivity usage the video-content has not been very popular here. So we are very careful while selling ad space across this platform and we make sure that the ad's maximum run time is 15 seconds. Even across our webpages we do not have more than 2 ad units."

In late December last year, BBC Entertainment a channel from BBC Worldwide's stable opened up to advertising. Talking about the overall market's response, she says beaming with confidence, "The market has responded very well because we had to get back to the market only when we were very clear that we had a great offering to be put out in the market, that the offering was differentiated and that the offering is fresh in terms of content. We launched the channel with about 8 advertisers on board and we have slowly touched base with around 20 brands today. We are bringing in fresh content in February and March and we will also telecast fresher and newer episodes of Sherlock Holmes. So our latest offering and property on the channel will be the biggest driver for advertisers to be associated with us. We are looking at more of sponsorships for our proporties than cluttering the ad time on the channel."

BBC World News, a 24 hour international news and information channel, another famous offering by BBC Worldwide is available in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide and reaches 303 million households. In February last year, BBC World News got a new look, introduced a new schedule and a new weekend line up to cater to regional audiences and sharpen the focus of the channel in the regional markets.

Elaborating more on BBC World News good performance across markets, Mohapatra adds,"For BBC World News we have grown across the major metros over the years and we have also focused more on building our distribution channels. We are in about 18.5 million homes and DTH platform has also helped us build our reach further. Even in terms of advertisments we are looking at clients who are looking at reaching an English viewer in the big cities and at the same time also across the small towns. We carried out a study which revealed that audiences across smaller towns are showing interest in BBC's offerings."

While signing off Mohapatra adds that new media will play an important role as a marketing tool this year and that marketers will look at providing better engagment and customised offerings to the consumers. | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]