Thinking outside the blocks: The BBC News brand tracker story

Kevin Cowan, Oliver Taylor, Jon Puleston and Julie Soulsby

How the BBC World Service adapted its brand tracking to improve representativeness, accuracy, usability and negotiate unanticipated events.

Introduction

Most market research is done technically very well, but it often fails to produce useful meaningful marketing metrics…There is no point in tracking and regularly reporting metrics that do not change, or do so very slowly. A good medical practice will measure the weight and blood pressure of patients each time they visit, but sensibly they will measure the height of adult patients only rarely.

—Byron Sharp (2017)

New times call for new tools. This paper will show you the journey the BBC World Service audience's team have taken to develop an adaptive and dynamic global news tracker. It...

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