Product Transformation at the BBC

Lee Cooper at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/6zHftbARI8g

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

BBC Studios and the brief to rebuild bbc.com

[00:00:14] Thank you. Yep, I'm Lee Cooper. I am VP for product for, actually, BBC Studios, and I think that's an important difference. I'm here to talk to you about how we transformed bbc.com, which is one of the world's largest web sites. It's one of the biggest undertakings from a technology perspective that BBC Studios has ever undertaken, and there are many aspects I could talk to you about today. I could probably talk for hours about certain things, but really what I want to talk to you about is how we delivered this in partnership with our BBC colleagues, specifically how we balanced our commercial aspirations in Studios without abandoning our public service purpose and identity.

[00:00:59] In terms of structure, I'll give you a bit of context and history about why we embarked on this journey, also around some of the process things we put in place and how that then manifests itself in the product, and then I'll finish with some lessons learned before opening up to questions.

[00:01:16] I suspect most of you know the BBC and its mission to inform, educate and entertain. If you don't know, it's the public service broadcaster within the UK. But many people I meet do not know what Studios is, or aren't really familiar with what Studios is. It is essentially the commercial arm of the BBC. We operate at a global scale. We're not licence funded in any way, shape or form, so whatever we do needs to stand on its own two feet. We exist to generate revenue that is then put back into the BBC to lessen the load on the licence fee, but also help them achieve their mission.

[00:02:06] And we cover many, many aspects. We make content, we sell content, we have digital products, we do many things. But for the purposes of this presentation, the most important thing to remember is that we're responsible for the commercialization of BBC News outside the UK. I'm not sure if many of you have seen BBC presentations before, but it's mandatory that we have a video, so I'm going to play a little video that shows the context of our news and what our aspirations are.

[00:02:42] Mr President, pleasure to meet you. This border has become highly politicized. The war in this area is extremely active. The presence of international media is rare here. These were the voices he felt were unheard. There's a new king. Don't you feel an obligation or duty? Humanity's approach is really not working. All they want is unity. Curiosity is one of the driving forces of mankind. A very emotional statement has just come through, in fact.

[00:03:43] News is part of the lifeblood of the BBC. We have a rich history of delivering trusted, impartial journalism to audiences not only in the UK but around the world. Today that is more important than ever. There was a talk by Tim Davie, our Director General, fairly recently, where he talked about being a reliable source of information around the world being more important now than ever, when we're facing an increasingly fragmented media, polarized media, and we're in an age of disinformation, and that's only getting worse. So our brief to rebuild the bbc.com website is more important, and is a really important brief, so we needed to make sure that we got it right.

A UK-centric product for an international audience

[00:04:31] A bit of history. The first bbc.co.uk was launched in 1997, and what you see here is a variety of treatments and evolutions that were served to a UK audience that had that affinity with the BBC brand. Periodically throughout that time we've exported the same treatment to our international audiences. They're essentially UK-centric websites for audiences that have a deeply ingrained relationship with the BBC, that our international audiences don't always have. So understanding the differences between those audiences is key to our transformation.

[00:05:15] In the UK, the BBC is a bit like oxygen. You're introduced to it as a child and it stays with you. You can't really escape it. It's there. You have an association with it whether you like it or not. That's not always the case with our international audiences. BBC is a well-known brand, but we don't have that holistic understanding of what the BBC is or the purpose it serves. People know us for types of shows, or they know us for our presenters, or they know us for news. So we are more of a challenger brand in a lot of ways.

[00:05:56] When we took up this challenge in 2022, our international version needed a bit of a digital overhaul. What we had was an à la carte experience of slightly mismatched dishes, when what we really needed was a coherent, elevated tasting menu. New sections had been largely inherited from our .co.uk website, and we had created specific pages and topics that had been bolted onto that product, so it never felt like a coherent product experience. We had a wide range of design templates and treatments, inconsistent branding and a complex architecture. When we started this, I think we counted nine CMSs that were involved in the content curation and management, so it was a bit of a Frankenstein of a product. That fragmented product experience resulted in a confusing relationship with the brand and our customer base.

[00:07:03] So it was a bit of a time for a reset. We needed to be more intentional about our audience and its endeavors and how we serve that mission and purpose to generate revenue. We needed to create a more coherent, consistent and sophisticated web experience for our users and, importantly, drive that commercialization outside the UK.

The mission and the balance between public service and commercial

[00:07:23] So we started with, I'm a product person, a lot of you are product people, we always go, what is the mission, and what does that mean for us as product people? I'm not going to read the slide, but there's a few key phrases and elements in here that helped us shape how we delivered this and what some of our objectives were. Sustaining the BBC's mission was paramount, absolutely non-negotiable. It was essential for us to support that overall mission with whatever we did.

[00:07:55] Outside the UK, which is the last words on there, that's the important thing, and I'm sure you're getting the pattern of that already. We needed to give them what they wanted in a way that was more familiar to them, and consider ourselves as a challenger brand. They don't have that affinity. They needed a more familiar experience and a more tailored experience to an international audience. All of this needed to be done with growing commercial opportunities. As I mentioned, we're not licence fee funded, so everything we do needs to stand on its own two feet, and in this case that means advertising and sponsorship. We needed to drive that revenue and make sure that it was supporting the product and the business. And striking the right balance between our public service ethos and commercial approach is where the challenge began.

[00:08:45] Now, as I said, I'm in Studios, but Public Service have a long history with news. The ethos is ad free, universally accessible, serves everyone, everything, and it's driven by rigorous editorial standards. Naturally they're a risk-averse company. That's what's made them successful, that's what has made them the entity that they are today, and it runs deep within our news culture. My job and the job of my team: we had to bring our Public Service colleagues on the journey and help them understand why transformation, and driving that commercial, and getting that balance right between commercial and non-commercial, was so important. So how did we do this?

Inform, educate, listen, collaborate

[00:09:37] Firstly, we informed. Now, I'm sure it's a common story in any organization. It is with every organization I've ever been in, and I'm sure it's a familiar story for a lot of you. Just because an initiative is green lit does not mean that everyone magically knows about it. So our first exercise was to disseminate that information throughout the organization.

[00:10:02] Secondly, we needed to educate. What was the scope of what we were doing and why? This needed really careful messaging. If you think that, pre doing this piece of work, most of the ecosystem and the website was built by Public Service, I couldn't just rock up and go, your product doesn't suit our needs anymore, thank you very much. That would have landed and caused a tension from the outset, and to be honest that's not what we wanted to do. We wanted to leverage what made sense and build what we needed to build to be commercially flexible. So our messaging had to be very careful. We needed to educate them on what we wanted to do and why, and we also needed to make sure they understood the rationale and what had been green lit in the scope of it.

[00:10:54] Entertain. Well, actually, I'd love to shoehorn entertain in and make this a nice little bow around "we followed the BBC's mission", but I can't. After doing many roadshows, not even after a hundred roadshows could I argue that it's entertaining. But roadshows is a really important thing. Our key thing that we did to gain that buy-in, get that message in, was we did hundreds and hundreds of roadshows. We went around the organization educating them on what we had been approved, why it had been approved and what this meant, and trying to create that shared problem and buy-in.

[00:11:36] So rather than entertain, we listened. Ultimately, for me, this listening was probably the most important step in this process. Yes, it's great to go and pitch to people and tell them what you're trying to do, but there are a lot of people in the BBC and in BBC Studios that have deep expertise, passion, knowledge, have been doing this for a long, long time. We needed to make sure that we listened to their views. Listening to them also made us realize, is what we're saying landing in the right way? We could course correct, we could make sure that things are explained and debated a bit more. But ultimately, why we wanted to listen to them and present to them is to create this shared understanding and this shared problem, and therefore a target, a shared solution. Ultimately we wanted to collaborate.

[00:12:34] Now, I'm sure you're staring at me going, that's fine, common sense, we all do it and it's pretty easy. But it wasn't simple, and why? Because that's my stakeholder map, and that is a massively, massively simplified version. For context, the green blobs are Public Service and the white blobs are Studios. What this doesn't show you is that there's multiple layers within each one of those labels. It really was far more complex than that. It also doesn't show any external parties. We worked with external parties through this. We had existing vendors.

[00:13:17] I'm not joking when I said we did roadshows to everyone here. Maybe not the same roadshow to everyone and to the same degree, but we covered this entire stakeholder base multiple times, and we repeated and refreshed that regularly. So just to reflect, we went through our process of informing, educating, listening and collaborating. So what were some of the results?

Architecture: an independent commercial stack that reuses what makes sense

[00:13:42] Let's start with architecture. Again, some of the things you'll see here are common sense, but there is an underlying complexity to this, and I hope you get a sense of that as we go through. Firstly, from a Studios perspective, we needed an independent commercial stack, within reason. We needed to be in control of our own destiny. We needed to be able to serve our audiences in a way that was commercially viable, and our ad providers and those sorts of stakeholders.

[00:14:17] There is a huge array of existing solutions, as you can imagine, with the BBC. It's 100 years old. It serves many purposes, does many things, and that comes with a lot of technology. It would be remiss of us not to try and leverage some of those existing components, but only where it made sense.

[00:14:39] Taking that one step further, some of those existing components were specifically built for the UK need and the UK market. So we needed to work with our colleagues and extend and select things which made sense from a commercial perspective to leverage, but we needed to extend some of those things to make sure they are internationally viable.

[00:15:00] And lastly, again not rocket science, and I've already heard it from some of the presentations today, going up to the top point about our independent stack, we bought things that made sense and integrated things like our consent management tool. We would never build one; we would buy one and integrate. But what we did build, we also built on familiar or common frameworks like WordPress or React. So let's now take a look at some of the product differences and how they manifested themselves.

Same content, different treatment

[00:15:37] Same content, different treatment. One of the core principles that we put in place, and was agreed from the outset, is that the content coming out of the news environment and the UK news team cannot and should not be changed. We didn't want to do that. We never wanted to change it. That would just create so much duplication and a departure, and that's not our purpose, or that wasn't our objective. But what we did want to do is treat it differently and allow it to be tailored to an international audience. I'll take you through a couple of relatively simple examples of this.

[00:16:18] At the top here you'll see the UK page, which might be familiar for those of you from the UK, and you'll see the global page, which you can see here now if you log in. This is the current product on both sides. Previously, globally it would have looked very similar to the top example. But gone are the colors and iconography of things like iPlayer and Sounds, which simply aren't available outside the UK, so they're not relevant. We've also pared back the brand. We haven't abandoned it completely. If you see out there, News is still red, but there's a hint of red rather than a blast of red.

[00:17:03] This is something that our marketing and brand teams worked tirelessly on, to make sure that we weren't off brand, and in the BBC brand it still had familiarity, but felt less specific to the UK, and we could start to build the brand affinity outside of the UK with people who don't really know us. That's particularly important for attracting new users.

[00:17:33] The other key difference here is the navigation. As I said, we removed the iconography, but we also removed things that aren't relevant and not available outside the UK, and we also changed that to make it more internationally leaning. Our biggest audience is in the US, so you'll see a lot of US things here. We didn't get this right first time. We did a ton of research, and this is one of the easiest things to agree up front, but when we launched we made a few mistakes. We learned from those mistakes and we're still continuing to finesse some of those. I think it's important to continue to look at the data and finesse and make sure that we're serving the audience what they want as quickly as possible.

[00:18:21] Another difference is not just about content. We've taken the content and we've treated it differently, so that looks at different templates, different page layouts, but also different curation. Here is a comparative view of the business page on both sites. What you'll see in the UK is a very, very UK-centric view. There's one international story, the purple one, but that becomes the lead story in the US and international market, because simply things like meter and energy prices are not relevant to our international audiences. All of the content is available on both sides; it's just presented in different ways and curated in different ways. If I really wanted to find out about meters when I was sitting in Australia, I still can go and do that. It's just not the primary navigation.

[00:19:21] The other important thing to mention here is advertising. You'll see there's advertising. We always had advertising on the site, but because it was a replication, largely, of the UK site, those templates, because of the public service nature, were never designed to have ads in them. So it always felt a bit clunky. There was never the data support behind it. So we really made an effort to make sure that our ad pacing and our ad presence felt more natural and fit within the curation. It's a more premium experience for our advertisers and our users.

Reusing and adapting BBC components

[00:20:02] I mentioned the reuse of products, and there's a couple of key things I wanted to point out here. We had a desire, and it made absolute sense for us, to reuse technical components, but in some cases we needed to adapt those solutions. BBC in many ways has been a pioneer in the UK, both in broadcast and digital, so many of the things that they have built would probably be commercially available now. But that isn't to say we should just go and buy commercial tools. We needed to look at what we have internally and what makes sense to leverage. Those homegrown solutions are deeply integrated into our ecosystem, so bolting something else in might not always be the answer.

[00:20:52] The other thing to take away from that is, because they are so UK-centric, the BBC has been first to the table in many cases, they're built specifically for UK legislation, and in many ways the BBC has actually led on some of that legislation and standards. So they're built for the UK market, for our UK audiences, and they don't always comply with non-UK legislation or standards.

[00:21:18] Here's an example of that. It's a simple one, but it's a good example. We decided to use the BBC Media Player, the video player. It's a proprietary tool. Now, I could have gone off and bought a whole plethora of video players out there. There's tons and tons and tons of them. But we would have then had to spend money integrating that into the ecosystem, with our supply chain, to make sure that it fits. All the plumbing work that we would have had to do there would probably outweigh looking at how we improve this product.

[00:21:55] This is a simple example of subtitles. On the left hand side you'll see the UK treatment. It's pretty simple: subtitles on and off, and different font sizes. But in the US there is a massive amount of difference in terms of, you need to be able to change font size, font, background color, size, where it's positioned, different speakers, all of those sorts of things.

[00:22:24] My job and my team's job was to educate those product custodians and those product teams as to why it is necessary and why we needed to change their product, which they're very passionate about, which they own, which has its own roadmap, and find a way to get that done, and negotiate, and make sure it's understood as to why the larger benefit. So that buy-in, if you go back, that buy-in around the whole initiative, we also had to take down a layer: here's a specific change, here's a specific need, here's a specific piece of legislation that we needed to now get buy-in to and prioritized. That was a tough task, but ultimately what we've ended up here with is a product that now is much more mature than it was before.

Commercial versus non-commercial engagement: sign-in

[00:23:17] Lastly, commercial versus non-commercial engagement. I'm going to jump straight into the examples here. Again, one of our key objectives, as we're driving commercial revenue, is to know our customers. We needed to provide sign-in, we needed to give a signed-in experience, and we needed to start collecting the data. That meant that we could then collect data and make sure that we're building habitual use and helping our advertisers target customers.

[00:23:48] We decided to leverage BBC Account, which, if any of you have a BBC login, that's the tool we used. But that was only ever built to serve a UK audience. International needs had never, ever had to be a factor in their decision making. It was just not on their remit. So again, we needed to educate that team and work with that team. But here it's not about technical requirements per se. This is more around intent and tone and commercial norms. Some of the difference here is subtle but pretty important.

[00:24:20] Here's an example of the landing page in our global, again US, example, and the UK on the left. Obviously the color is different, but things like the imagery being different is important. The stuff on the left hand side is very specific to the UK. On the right it's much more neutral and has a wider context, so it introduces the concept of the BBC as a wide organization without looking at specific pieces of IP. The other thing is, some of that IP on the left hand side we don't own in the US, Australia, India, so it's misleading at best and potentially advertising for some of our competitors, which is obviously something we didn't want to do.

[00:25:07] Sign-in prompts are dismissable in the UK. It's there, you can see it. It is there on the right hand side, but you can't really see it. It's much harder to find, and that goes down to intent. The BBC in the UK do want people to sign in. It is one of their core KPIs, but it feels more optional, whereas for us we wanted to make it feel less optional, to create that stickiness with the customer. So we made it harder for them to opt out of that.

[00:25:39] Just quickly taking it through the flow, the sign-in flow again is similar but different. In the UK flow you explicitly have to ask age, you explicitly have to ask for location. Some of that is not industry standard; some of that is BBC standard. But in the US, age is implied, and the geography and where you sit is collected in the background. And probably the key thing here, which is probably very hard to decipher from here, but the language is different, the tone is different. We did a lot of research on that to make sure that that landed, and found that the US audience didn't understand, or the language didn't quite land, in the UK flow.

Results and lessons learned

[00:26:28] I'm just going to quickly run through the results. We launched in March. It was a huge deal. So far we've seen a 33% uplift in visitors year on year. That takes us to about 140 million. We've also seen an uplift of 83% in sign-in, so that is a great metric, and we're starting to gather that data. And then I thought long and hard about putting a negative number in a transformation journey that's supposed to be successful, but I wanted to make sure that I'm transparent. Habitual use is one of our key metrics, but it's a lagging metric. We wouldn't expect it to change now. We think of habitual use as users revisiting the site over a year, so we're not going to see the benefit of this until next April.

[00:27:20] In any of these things, what is my key advice to you if you're embarking on this journey? Don't skip or underestimate the groundwork in any way, shape or form. Be prepared to do it, be prepared to do it again and again and again, and have patience. Because I think without doing that, and without us embarking on that path, I honestly do not think we would have launched this product in the timeline we did.

[00:27:48] Change is inevitable. Whatever you set out to do is based on assumptions at best, so that is going to pivot. Things will change. It might be small, it might be large, but be prepared for it, and if you can, bake in time to pivot up front. And you won't get everything right. I mentioned our indexing and our navigation. That's okay, as long as you look at the data and be open to changing it and learning from that.

[00:28:16] And then finally, transformation is stressful and it involves a lot of human beings. Big scope, hard deadlines, tight budgets. As a team we really needed to look after each other and support each other, and without looking after each other and supporting each other there is no way we could have done this. Yep, I have got a video, but I've run out of time, so I will skip that.

Q&A

[00:28:54] Host: Thank you very much, Lee. Okay, a few questions. Top one: should we have a different company mission for different audiences or types of users?

[00:29:08] Lee: Well, for us they're similar but different, because of the nature of the businesses. Effectively we are a BBC company, but we are a commercial company, and the commercial element is not relevant in any way, shape or form to the BBC. So we don't really have a choice. We have to think differently. If we were to try to adopt the BBC mission and some of the charter things that you have to do, it wouldn't be commercially viable. So we have to pick and choose what we do and take the core elements. We can't abandon the BBC and what it's trying to do, but leverage the bits that we can to drive commercial value for the BBC at the end of the day. So whether it's right or wrong to have a difference, we don't have a choice, because we need to operate and think differently.

[00:30:03] Host: Great, thank you, Lee. Okay, you mentioned mistakes when you launched. Can you give us an example or two of those mistakes and how you learned from those?

[00:30:13] Lee: Yeah, so I think the indexing one was one of the most obvious ones. Whilst we're trying to attack an international audience, we pretty much forgot that there's a lot of expats there, and they are our key, loudest, most passionate users. So we went too far with non-UK content. We made it quite difficult, if I'm honest, to find some of the local news in the UK, and got a lot of feedback, and you could see the traffic drop very significantly on that. That's something we had built in the flexibility for, and we were able to adapt to that very quickly. But we went too far in terms of "international means no one is from the UK". It sounds like a silly mistake, but that was part of our mission, to attract new users, and we went too far with our existing users.

[00:31:14] Lee: I think some of the other ones, and we're still experimenting, is that ad pacing. That's not an exact science for anyone, but are we delivering the right amount of ads, not just for our customers but for our salespeople and for our partners? Honestly, I think we'll continue to evolve on that. I think we probably went too light initially and we've gone up a bit now, and we're looking at different ways to do that.

[00:31:40] Host: Okay, and I think, so, final question. How did you present your success metrics to the business? Did you focus on particular KPIs, and how frequently did you update them on the success?

[00:31:53] Lee: I think we're in a bit of a weird place. What we've done is deliver this huge thing, and our KPIs are now starting to come back and now starting to be demonstrated. I think the hardest thing that we had was we had a set of KPIs for the old site and our old business, and now we're starting to see how we've affected those KPIs going forward. I think there was a bit in the middle where we launched, where we were in a transition phase. That was the bit we really needed to communicate, because we expected a traffic drop at first. Indexing is a really good example. We made it easier to find content, and that looked like a massive traffic drop because people aren't clicking on the site. It's not a traffic drop; it's actually a positive thing. We needed to be very careful about how we measured this.

[00:32:51] Lee: Our challenge around KPIs and the results are now starting, and that lagging metric, the one that I took you through, is a good example, explaining why it's minus 10% now. It's a positive, it's not a negative. And some of those KPIs, in one of the talks this morning someone was talking about constant evolution and value. This was effectively a large waterfall project that had a hard deadline, hard budget, hard scope. So we needed to get the baseline product out before we then start to build and affect those KPIs.

[00:33:32] Host: Awesome, thank you very much, Lee.

[00:33:34] Lee: No problem.