Paul Dempsey

Paul Dempsey, who as president of global markets at BBC Worldwide has responsibility for operations in all non-English-language territories, shares his outlook on the company’s businesses across Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

WS: Why was the recent BBC Worldwide restructure an important move?
DEMPSEY: It’s on the back of two things that we saw were going to impact our business in the future. [There were] fast-emerging markets in the world where the appetite for our content was strong, but we hadn’t really focused on them—particularly Latin America and Asia—and then there were the more mature environments where we were more established, like the U.K. and North America and Australia. We felt we had to shift the organization to allow us to put more focus on the [emerging] regions. Secondly, the media landscape is getting so much more complicated that I don't know how in the future it will be easy for companies to operate with separate operating divisions in any one market. There’s so much fluidity between the channels you operate yourselves, third-party sales and the digital markets. We had areas of global expertise in all of those activities, but on the ground [were] disconnected and, ironically, incentivized to try and deliver different things. So as well as going to a regional structure, we integrated all the activities in the regions. [That gives you] focus and the ability to respond quickly to this changing environment.

WS: How do you strike a balance between selling to third-party clients and making signature content available to your branded channels in any given market?
DEMPSEY: We’ve been a mixed economy business for many years. We've got an established network of channels all over the world. We don’t have a blanket approach that favors one route to market over another in terms of windows. We try and bring some science at the title level that looks to see what’s the best way of maximizing the reach [of a given show]. You want to get the biggest audience you can, and of course maximize the value. Sometimes that’s recognizing that third-party broadcasters are the best way to premiere some of our content, sometimes it’s our own channels. I do think that will get even more interesting [as we] start challenging the traditional notion of windows. It’s going to become much more dynamic, where you have exclusivity, but perhaps for significantly shorter periods of time. We’re starting to think about what windowing looks like in the future. But profit maximization is what we’re about, so that’s going to be at the forefront of the decision-making. What’s the best way of getting the best value by maximizing the availability through various windows?

WS: You oversee a diverse range of markets. Let’s start with Latin America. How do you see BBC Worldwide’s presence in that region, and what are your growth opportunities?
DEMPSEY: To be frank, we’ve been in Latin America a long time—the BBC brand has been in Latin America for about 80 years—but it feels to me that we’re just starting. We’ve got a relatively small channels business on a pan-regional basis and a local channel in Brazil, but our distribution could be bigger and there's scope to improve the content on the channel for fans to get the very best of the BBC. We’ve got a third-party sales business which has had some great success with individual shows, but I don't think we’ve been clever enough in the way we’ve extracted the most value from the different platforms available to us in that market. I’m saying all that, which is quite a stark appraisal of where we are now, which you may find unusual, but I’ve come back from [a trip to BBC Showcase in Rio] feeling very upbeat about our prospects there. What surprised me more than anything, and I don’t know why it should, was that the BBC brand and its shows and even British-ness are very popular in Latin America. There’s a real interest in British-ness and therefore the BBC as an iconic British brand. There’s good evidence of that when you see the appeal of our shows: Doctor Who, Top Gear, some of the big dramas. That’s the hardest to get right—to get fans to appreciate what you do. What we’re scratching our heads about now is, how do we make that into a bigger business? That’s where we’ve got to get our thinking caps on. It may well be that we develop more targeted channels for ourselves or build stronger relationships with third parties. It may well be that we do quite a lot of over-the-top activity and digital. What I know is, we’ve built a strong team there, we’ve got big ambitions and an established base.

WS: And what about Asia?
DEMPSEY: I’ve been to most of the markets and the overriding impression I get is that to think of Asia as a region is a bit flawed in that it implies that what you do in India is the same thing you do in Japan and China and Indonesia. It’s a bit like people thinking Europe is a homogenous, single culture. We won't have a strategy for Asia, but there clearly are some massive markets there we need to have plans for. Where we're traditionally strong with our channels is Southeast Asia—Hong Kong, Singapore, have great audience appeal for our shows. For BBC Knowledge, there are times in the year where we’re even the biggest factual channel in Singapore, certainly one of the top three for pay TV. Indonesia is growing very well for us with our channels, Malaysia too, Hong Kong, and that’s where our channel footprint is. We still have big relationships for TV sales in all of those markets. [We’re thinking about] what brands we might want to focus on in terms of our channels and invest in building distribution and audiences.

And then we have to look at markets like India, Japan and Korea, particularly, where I suspect what’s most interesting is digital innovation. We’ve got established third-party relationships and they’re good and they’re strong, but there may be some things we can do to grow audiences ourselves or with partners digitally. It’s difficult not to be impressed when going to Seoul and seeing the behavior of people, in the streets, in cafes, on the tube, watching live broadcasts of HD programming which doesn’t buffer. That infrastructure there is so ready to embrace a new way of engaging with our content that we can really have some fun experimenting there.

WS: India has been a particular challenge over the last year, hasn’t it?
DEMPSEY: It’s really difficult to reconcile if you think about the BBC and its heritage in India. The BBC was the first program brand to ever appear on Indian television—with the launch of television, BBC was there. Not unlike a lot of people, we find it difficult to make an economic model work for us with our own channels there. We’ve been thinking about what we do next. Getting it right in India is very much a priority for us. Our programming is still available—we have a very strong production business there and we have our top brands there on other people’s channels, which is great.

WS: Let’s talk about the other emerging regions—Central and Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
DEMPSEY: Among our best performing markets for our channels are Poland and South Africa. We’re very happy with where we are there. That doesn’t mean we’re not thinking about what we might want to do next to build on the traction we've got. It’s a curious region. It’s not unique to us, but we have constructed something which doesn’t exist geographically or politically. Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa: There’s a lot of action in there! That’s 102 countries and they are quite different. I would group them in three ways. You’ve got very established markets for us, where there’s strong program sales plus our own channels—Poland and South Africa. We’ve got parts of that region which are more in Central and Eastern Europe where we’re in our building phase. We've established channels and they seem to be getting audience support and that’s a place from which to grow, and again we have third-party sales. And then there’s the rest of it, which I would call very new and exciting. I’m thinking particularly of Africa and the Middle East. How audiences there can get to know our programs and connect with them, probably without going through the traditional way of linear television, is a very exciting challenge. There are many more mobile phones in Africa than there are TV sets. It’s an interesting region. There’s much we can do. Evidence suggests that love of the BBC and the program brands that we represent have as much connection with the lives of people in that part of the world as they do anywhere.

WS: There are still many markets in Western Europe that are struggling economically. How do cope with these territories that aren’t spending as much money as they used to?
DEMPSEY: We’re fortunate in that we’re a global business. We do business in 200-plus markets around the world. We’re not reliant on any one revenue stream. We do have mixed income streams. That allows us to be more resilient in the face of the cyclical nature of economic changes and different business activities being stronger than others. Western Europe is a microcosm of that. Within Western Europe there are different revenue streams. You’ve got some very strong economies in Western Europe, even within the Eurozone.

WS: Over the next year, what are your overall goals for BBC Worldwide’s business in non-English-language markets?
DEMPSEY: We're going to talk a lot about that probably towards the end of this calendar year. There’s been leadership changes and organizational changes across both the BBC and BBC Worldwide. There’s a lot of thought going into what the next stage of growth is, where it is going to come from, what new strategy is going to deliver that. Towards the end of the year we’ll start to draw some conclusions and start to be public about what those are. We’ve not just maneuvered around our organizational structure, we’ve fundamentally reoriented it. It’s been a big shift. Many people are in new roles and doing new things in new ways. That will take a little time to settle down. A priority will be to make sure that we settle into the new ways we’re working, then lay out the plans of what we’re going to do. There will be individual markets that are priorities for us. We’ll establish what they are and what we intend to do. And then it will be about, with the local teams we have in those regions, quickly building the in-market connections to make [those goals] happen. It’s going to be an interesting and bold time for us over the next 12 to 18 months as we lay out these big ambitions.