Watch your proposition

Oh dear. The people who have the dangerous and difficulty job of marketing the BBC to us (Ed: It's a pushover, always was, always has been) have won an award. And a spread in Marketing Week to go with it.  Apparently, despite cuts of 25% in their budget, they've restructured and focussed on the "masterbrand".

I'm still waiting for a full translation to arrive, but here's a flavour. “The restructure was about creating an organisation where marketing could work far more upstream than before."

And in News, Sanjay Nazerali, "brand director of journalism UK and International", offers a "case study" of a clearly entirely new concept that's driving us relentlessly towards Huw Edwards.

“We’ve embedded a marketer within the newsroom,” he explains. “As the news is being cut live for the 10 O’clock News at night, a trail for it is being cut live at the same time. It’s being cut by news people but there’s a marketer in the gallery so the script, the positioning and the proposition is all done by marketing.” 


Nazerali says that it is the mix of editorial cutting and marketing planning that makes this effective. The BBC had tried to get the editorial news teams to cut trailers without marketing involved, but it had resembled a mini news bulletin. By adding marketing into the process, the trailer is now able to form more of a tease for the upcoming news: “Troops storm Afghanistan but will this be enough to…?” 


“The news team like this so much that they are out in the field voicing the final copy line for the marketing trail,” claims Nazerali. “We even had someone reporting from Libya in a tank who wanted to voice a marketing copy line. That’s an extraordinary coup.” 


The marketing is also essentially free as it reuses footage already cut for editorial reasons. “We have a trail that can go out every single day and the cost of that marketing is pretty much zero. There is no incremental cost to any party,” says Nazerali.