Marketing v product choice

Four related posts about the BBC strategy review

The Asian Network, as a national DAB station, has been through three changes of direction since its launch in 2002. The first incarnation was a sort of Five Live with music. But it had problems finding a distinctive news agenda, and Jenny Abramsky, after a internal review, decided to put more emphasis and funding into speech and news reporting, with Bob Shennan, then at 5Live, taking strategic control. Sadly, that did little to improve figures. Step forward, Andy Parfitt, Controller of Radio 1 and 1Xtra - who deemed it was the music that should move it forward. No, said the audience, quite firmly. And now we're back to a sort of late 80s GLR/GMR format - news, phone-ins, music and interviews, with a target of a "family" audience.

Tim Davie's background is in marketing, and this must look like a product failure. But the BBC is not a business - it's there to serve audiences who have no option but to buy a tv licence if they want to watch broadcast tv in this country. And the idea is to make as many of them feel good about it as possible. Sadly, "Putting Quality First" is a document aimed at opinion-formers, not the audience in general. There's more than a link between its title and the current series of tv promotions on BBC One pointing to erudite programmes on BBC2 and BBC4.

Those programme promotion slots are fought over by controllers and divisions, but someone sets the strategy - and if someone had the will to support the Asian Network, it could be done. As ITV and Sky always rush to point out, these trailers are a marginal cost to the BBC.

The "product choice" of the BBC in launching this network was to address diversity issues in both audience reach and internal recruitment. The most popular news output for Britain's Asian community is Channel 4 News. It looks like it will be for a while....