Give us a clue

Not much to decode in the latest BBC Board minutes, from April - a meeting before Matt Brittin formally joined. The analysis of "where we are" as a broadcaster is clear, but there's no a jot on solutions... 

5.4 The Board considered the audience performance data for the quarter. It had been the best quarter of the year for Audience Scorecard performance with 14 of the 30 metrics green. Strong content across all genres was the key driver, along with a high level of audience engagement with News stories. In January-March, universality remained strong; depth metrics performed better and global reach was well ahead of its target,
driven by international news coverage. Overall online reach and accounts were at record  levels with seven out of 10 people using online services; this increase had been driven by the Winter Olympics digital offering and a strong iPlayer performance.

5.5 However, overall audience performance had not been replicated among young adults. Directors discussed the fragmenting youth audience and the challenges of attracting young people to the BBC, particularly given their greater preference for short-form content. Directors agreed that a briefing on how the brand power metric was comprised would be useful. 

...and there we have some of the problem. "Brand power metric" shows the current crop of BBC executives and their minders have been captured by commercial marketing blah-blah. At least, the non-executives were prepared to admit they didn't understand it.  Oh, for a BBC powered by the ideas, energy, horizon-scanning and risk-taking of the old school of public service broadcasting impresarios. 

So now we move into one of those embarassing periods for the BBC, where they follow, rather than lead. Think the creation of Radio 1, the sneaky arrival of Breakfast TV, the stripping of quiz shows and magazine programmes across daytime. Now, a helter-skelter race is on to hire Tik-Tokkers, Instagrammers and YouTubers, all dressed up in BBC 'commissioning processes', without any serious clue of where this sort of activity sits in public-service broadcasting, or, indeed, whether or not it deserves licence-fee funding.