The Broadcast Business

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The EMEA headquarters of CNBC International is exactly where you’d expect to find a leading business broadcaster – an impressive skyscraper in the City of London, close to St Paul’s. With the button-free lift interiors, it took me a moment to realise that if I wanted to rise like a bull market I had better step back out again in search of some numbers. It’s always a numbers game in the City. 

But once the high-tech lift system has been navigated, everything – reassuringly – appears just as it is supposed to on arrival at reception on CNBC’s floor. The channel’s live content plays on TV screens and a state-of-the-art broadcast studio is visible through soundproof glass. Earlier in the day, CNBC’s morning shows Squawk Box Europe and Street Signs Europe were broadcast from here. But it’s midday now, so the studio is deserted; America has woken up. By combining programming from EMEA, the US and Asia, CNBC positions itself as providing the perfect 24-hour global business briefing. To deliver that, of course, it must understand both its audience and its advertisers. With this in mind, CNBC International appointed David Evans as head of data and insight in April 2016. 

Evans has a huge amount of experience in the media sector, having cut his teeth at broadcaster Eurosport for six years and, more recently, working with clients such as the Content Marketing Association and Digital Cinema Media through his own consultancy, DRES.

“My role is, primarily, commercial – so the main purpose is to serve the commercial team in helping them win business,” Evans explains. “That means working at the beginning of discussions with clients to prove the value of CNBC, demonstrate the quality of our audience, and demonstrate the quality of our advertising solutions as well. Where, probably, a lot of media owners in this space have concentrated simply on the reach argument, I think it is very important to show the quality of our audience. That is key.” 

That audience is a collection of the world’s business elite, looking for breaking business and financial news – and hoping to see it before anyone else. According to CNBC, its output reaches more CEOs, CFOs, and decision-makers than any of its closest rivals, and members of its core audience are earning €225,000-plus a year, predominately. 

As influential business decision-makers and high-net-worth individuals, this audience is attractive to both B2B and upscale consumer advertisers. Unsurprisingly, CNBC’s major advertising verticals are finance, luxury goods, technology, foreign direct investment and travel. 

Evans is working on beefing up effectiveness programmes “to justify the investment and prove that what we are saying at the beginning is actually true”. In particular, he is putting benchmarks in place to provide “some tangible answers” on the delivery of specific advertising objectives – something CNBC International has not done before.

Viewer strategy

Although Evans’ main focus is on working with advertisers, he is also involved in audience strategy. The central question he is wrestling with here is, how to increase consumption of CNBC content. Should the emphasis be on attracting new people or encouraging current consumers to view more often? 

Another burning issue centres on moving viewers from watching programmes just on TV to consuming them digitally as well. In the week beginning 11 July 2016, CNBC experimented by streaming its flagship morning show, Street Signs, on Facebook. Clearly, for commercial reasons, CNBC could not run its ads on Facebook, so its social media team used the ad breaks to deliver immersive content, including a behind-the-scenes look at CNBC’s headquarters and the chance to ‘meet’ some of its journalists. 

“It’s about approaching things from a different angle,” says Evans. “We are trying to reach not only the business leaders of today, but also the business leaders of tomorrow. Facebook is not a natural habitat for top-tier CEOs. If you look at our audience via Facebook, it is much more in that 25 to 34 age bracket – aspirational people who are, perhaps, studying at the moment, or in the early stages of moving up the career ladder. Whereas the TV product is much more geared to the people who are at the top of the tree.” 

At the time of writing, CNBC is poring over the metrics and weighing up how to proceed with its social and digital evolution – but, one way or another, proceed it will. Changing viewing habits make this inescapable. According to Ofcom, 16- to 24-year-olds are embracing on-demand TV enthusiastically; live TV accounts for a mere 36% of their daily viewing, a decrease of 14 percentage points in two years. It is obvious which way the wind is blowing. “Our mobile play has got to be a lot stronger; our digital play has got to be a lot stronger,” says Evans. “You have to play in that playground.”

From audience to events

The day after Evans joined the company in April, CNBC International announced the launch of CNBC Catalyst, an in-house full-service agency. Under the auspices of CNBC vice-president, Max Raven, Catalyst has been created as a single destination for brands targeting the C-suite. It brings together ad sales executives, brand strategists, the content studio and, of course, data and insight expertise. 

The latter is evidently a crucial part of the mix. Evans was, in effect, the final piece of the jigsaw and Catalyst’s menu of services can be summed up in the shorthand ABCDE: audience, brand consultancy, content, data and events & experiences. “Because we are targeting such a specialist, niche audience, once you reach them via one means, it makes sense to extend that by other paths,” says Evans. “The client can come to us and we can have a macro approach with advertising, but it can be micro as well, because we have got the influence. 

“We have 5,000 CEOs coming through our offices every year, so if we need to open our black book and get a roundtable of 12 industry experts that our clients want to speak to, we are able to do that as well. Our data and insights help underpin all the different aspects. We can deliver the data, which helps devise the brand strategy.”

Increasingly, briefs arriving from clients are about thought leadership and brand positioning. While TV advertising may be part of the solution, it is not necessarily so. The whole point of Catalyst is to broaden the client offer and CNBC is reaping some dividends from this way of thinking. It has, for example, launched events and Facebook content for the oil company Total, around its energy challenges of tomorrow, and is working with professional services firm EY on seminars and events looking at the implications of Brexit. 

Live events are of interest to Evans, not only as a revenue stream, but also as a potential means of getting “up close and personal” with the CNBC audience. With the proviso that it will always be a comfortable experience for event attendees, he is keen to have “observational, ethnographic-type conversations with people”, and gather information in an engaging way.

CEOs are people too

This is all part of Evans’ desire to further CNBC’s understanding of business leaders. The goal is not only to find out more about how they consume news content, but also to build a broader perspective and learn more about how they behave as individuals.

“We want to explore the life of a C-suite executive a lot more deeply than we have done in the past,” says Evans. “We are mining everything we have on that, internally, producing the story. Once we have exhausted what we’ve got here, then we can work out where those gaps are, and lay on top the other areas that we need to explore.”

The likelihood is that, once the team has a clearer picture of what is required, it will hire a specialist agency to further its insight into C-suite executives. “It’s for us to be experts in that and for us to educate our clients,” Evans elaborates. “I am especially keen to create the kind of insight that tells stories.”  

While the parameters for this bespoke research are still taking shape, CNBC is not short of access to other information. It buys the syndicated Ipsos Affluent Survey for Europe, US and Asia and uses GlobalWebIndex (GWI) for digital insight. Given its mix of at-home and in-office viewing, CNBC does not regard TV metering as particularly useful.

As well as subscribing to GWI’s main survey platform – where it can glean information on 300,000 respondents every year across its main regions – CNBC also tags up its website to monitor actual, as well as claimed, behaviour. Users are sometimes re-contacted, either to delve deeper on advertising effectiveness work or to assess the impact of other content. 

Advertising content

In its many forms, content is vital to the success of the business, so – in the first week of May – CNBC launched a new international series, Marketing.Media.Money. Airing as a 30-minute, monthly TV feature with companion digital and social content, it aims to navigate the $600bn global advertising market. Rather than focus on the creative side of advertising, it explores how advertising meshes into the global economy. One major trend it addresses repeatedly is the need for media owners to adapt their business model in response to competitive disruption and changing patterns of media consumption – issues with which CNBC is itself wrestling.    

Charlie Crowe, the media entrepreneur and chairman of global publishing and events company C Squared, is a regular guest contributor to the programme. In his view, by producing a show that analyses the changing media landscape, quizzes senior marketers on the tough calls they make, and tells the financial story of the sector, CNBC is bolstering its credentials as an expert in this complicated field. “If the show does its job and offers insights that cannot be found elsewhere – and manages to make the link between the finance and investment community and the media business – then that should rightly confer a halo effect on the show, and so on CNBC,” says Crowe. “And that’s not a bad thing.” 

CNBC’s data shows that viewers watch the channel for a purpose. “It’s not a sit-back experience,” says Evans. “It is something they are watching to help them – to give them that competitive edge, whether they are personal investors, or from a business perspective.”

The challenge for Evans and his team in the future is to take insight to the next level by unearthing tangible examples of how content has given people competitive advantage, and to get an even better handle on how the titans of the C-suite live their lives.