BBC World defines the Internationalists

With the launch of a multimedia global trade campaign, BBC World has undertaken to define its target audience for marketers, advertisers and media planners and buyers around the world. The campaign provides a new way of looking at the channel’s audiences and terms them as the ‘Internationalists’.

According to Jonathan Howlett, director, advertising sales, BBC Global Channels, the quality of people that watch the channel is diverse in behaviour and attitude. They comprise groups such as academia, science, culture, the public sector, opinion drivers, global citizens and working business professionals. To reach out and communicate with such a group effectively, there was a need to understand their distinctive qualities. The Internationalist campaign allows in expressing the nature and attitudes of its audience with a new level of insight and clarity to the media industry in an innovative way.

The campaign defines Internationalists as a cosmopolitan group of global citizens who are decision drivers, avid travellers, big spenders and conscientious consumers. These people are early adapters, global influencers and are committed to global issues and lifelong learning. Internationalists are in the age group of 25-40 years and belong to the SEC A class and above.

As per the Pan Asia-Pacific Cross Media Survey (PAX Survey), the number of top management business people tuning into the BBC’s 24-hour news and information channel each week and each month, has jumped by 27 per cent and 13 per cent, respectively, in the last two years in the region. In India, BBC World currently reaches out to 16.5 million people. This figure has seen a 15 per cent rise in the last couple of years.

The survey also revealed that among business travellers, BBC World viewers spend the most nights in hotels on business, with an average of 22 nights a year, a fifth more than viewers of the other main regional channels.

Overall, BBC World attracts 76 million viewers a week throughout the world. The channel is available in more than 200 countries and reaches 270 million households and 1.4 million hotel rooms. The channel’s content is also available on 54 cruise ships, 38 airlines, 35 mobile phone networks and a number of major online platforms.

The specially created Internationalist website, www.bbcworldinternationalist.com, showcases the unique qualities of the Internationalists and their appeal to a wide range of advertisers. It also has a fun interactive Internationalists game and screensavers.

To further promote the idea of the campaign, BBC World has created an island, called the BBC Island, in the virtual world of Second Life. Second Life has a base of 9 million people from all over the globe and provides BBC an opportunity to introduce the diverse, well-travelled and global audience of Internationalists to the media industry. People seeking to understand the target group for BBC can attend a virtual conference on BBC Island by creating virtual avatars of themselves. The conference is presented by Spencer Kelly, the presenter of Click, BBC World’s technology programme.

Following the Internationalist conference, people can explore and interact with the island’s multimedia displays, download BBC World information, collect gifts, chat with BBC World’s global network of guests, and enter a competition to win a round-the-world ticket.

The direct mailer is a pocket puzzle cube featuring intermingling portions of different faces belonging to different people. On solving the puzzle, the cube shows five distinct faces of people from different parts of the world and the BBC World logo on the sixth side.

The idea behind creating a direct mailer with such a feature is to make the media industry understand that the target group for BBC World is segregated all over the world. But even so, it uniquely forms a common cosmopolitan group of global citizens who are decision drivers, avid travellers, big spenders and conscientious consumers. The packaging on the puzzle cube has a line, which says, “Have you figured out our audience?”