myBBC Accenture helps BBC’s digital revolution get personal. myBBC | Accenture Digital Video helps BBC’s digital revolution get personal | 2 OVERVIEW In a speech BBC Director-General, The BBC’s mission is to ‘inform, Tony Hall gave on “the BBC in the internet era” on 2nd March 2015, educate and entertain’. Fulfilling that the broadcaster was declared at “the start of a real transformation remit requires the BBC to remain – the myBBC revolution”. One key challenge and opportunity relevant for its broad audience, for the BBC, he noted, was “How to reinvent public service serving both specific niche tastes and broadcasting through data.” To support this vision, myBBC formed delivering more populist content. the foundation that would enable the organization to harness the power of data to deliver true personalization for virtually every online user, provide advanced tools and capabilities to drive a two-way relationship with its audience, and leverage the power of analytics to support and inform decision-making for editorial and creative teams throughout the organization. It’s a bold strategy. myBBC | Accenture Digital Video helps BBC’s digital revolution get personal | 3 OPPORTUNITY myBBC is a significant and Asking users to sign-in enables the substantial strategic leap for the BBC to coordinate experiences BBC. In an age when audiences across every audience touchpoint. are becoming more fragmented And by learning from audience across multiple forms of digital behaviors and preferences, the media, the BBC set out to drive BBC is able to continuously a more personalized relationship increase the relevance of what it with its audience. To achieve this, offers. It can help the BBC learn it is looking to big data analytics about its users as individuals, to build a truly one-to-one understand their likes and dislikes, personal relationship across its and make suggestions about online product portfolio including other digital products and content BBC iPlayer, BBC News and BBC they would find interesting and Sport that is radically different appealing. This helps promote from a traditional broadcaster. a high level of engagement and repeat visits, both essential KPIs for BBC’s suite of digital products. myBBC | Accenture Digital Video helps BBC’s digital revolution get personal | 4 SOLUTION Delivering personalization requires a strong value proposition that offers previously anonymous audience members a strong incentive to sign-in. Achieving that lies in ensuring a compelling set of features, whose benefits far outweigh the “hurdle” of registration and sign-in. Becoming a data-driven media organization that constantly myBBC uses the information it receives Anayltics Services provide insight and data to all other from users across all its content parties in lifecycle and services to innovate and develop new services is core to the myBBC experience-led transformation. A common platform accessible to all of BBC’s digital products was therefore essential to allow the BBC to make data-driven decisions Usage Monitoring & Analytics User Activity Service Providing better understanding of Enbabling cross-device pause based on what audiences love how well the BBC’s service are being functionality, “favouriting” content and why. It requires tools that used, and who by and powering advanced analytics help online products to build Content Commissioning SSO Identity loyalty and a true sense that the Editorial teams able to commission A single user identity to facilitate user experience is tailored to audience- and tailor content based on detailed identification across the entire BBC specific needs. insights about their audience estate, powering value-added services such as voting, user comments & Content Recommendations other future media services And that’s the goal that informed Directing the audience to content all of Accenture’s work with depending on their vierwing habits Notifications Providing personalized notifications the BBC. of new content and features, based on what a user follows with the UAS To help the BBC reach its goal, featured and highly reliable online voting for programs like Accenture and the myBBC teams solution, personalization would Strictly Come Dancing) and worked to deliver: be impossible. Accenture helped introducing token-based OpenID to address challenges arising connect authentication. The from an ageing identity system latter opened BBC ID to native Identity management with custom integration into mobile applications for the first more than 30 products and time; providing a major step in A simplified, flexible, web- apps across the BBC estate. cross-device personalization for scale identity platform was The initial roadmap focused on the 6.4 million signed-in users critical to achieve the goals bolstering capacity to support since May 2015. of myBBC – without a fully high-volume events (such as myBBC | Accenture Digital Video helps BBC’s digital revolution get personal | 5 Seamless Sign-in across within the BBC’s online estate. The platform ingests over one Public Service and BBC Products can make use of billion events on a daily basis Commercial Products functionality from User Activity from real behavioral data in the Service like pause/resume across user activity service, sign-ins and devices, voting, commenting, registration information and other Working with BBC user experience, bookmarking, and favouriting BBC analytics services, to provide product management and – while myBBC explicitly and a wealth of information on the technology staff, Accenture implicitly learns more about its BBC’s audience. Bringing all data enabled seamless single sign-on audience. This ‘symbiotic’ data together in one place enables the across all BBC’s public service store provides a cloud-based BBC to start asking more complex and commercial digital products, record of activities and enables questions to which the previously enabling such initiatives as BBC services to offer personalized siloed data stores could provide the launch of BBC Store, a key recommendations, notifications only partial answers. Additional strategic initiative to make full and lists of favored content. sources of data can be rapidly use of the BBC’s rich history of added to enrich views and further premium content. Following on User Notifications refine the BBC’s understanding of from this, Accenture continued to its audience, promoting curation work with the BBC to develop and and production of increasingly operate the new BBC Account; A platform that allows audiences relevant and inspiring content rolling out a leading-edge Forge to know when content they’re informed by the resulting Rock based solution to support likely to be interested in becomes segments they are able to devise. BBC’s broader capabilities around available is critical to deliver audience identity management. an ongoing, engaging digital Accenture leveraged resource experience. The notification and experience from its Video User Activity service provides a pan-BBC Marketing and Monetization solution to send users an alert Services offering to provide when new content is available. Creating a relationship with expertise in selecting the best As the service expands, making every myBBC user depends on technology solution, constructing more and more content types knowing what they do across all the infrastructure, and integrating from across the BBC available, services and associated content. the data sources. experiences across the web, This means not only what people mobile and other devices will watch or read, but their other seamlessly join together to help interactions, such as commenting users get the latest updates on and ‘favouriting’ particular their favorites wherever they are services or even individual pieces – creating a stronger relationship of content. Amassing data with the audience regardless of about an individual’s activities device or BBC Product they are creates the possibility of making relevant recommendations and interacting with. suggesting other items of interest - such as forthcoming events or Single Customer View programs. It enables the BBC to transform from an anonymous Being able to build one-to-one service to a trusted, informative relationships with every user and valued companion. rests on the ability to gather comprehensive data about every Accenture helped to create a User audience member’s activity. Activity Service that provides To that end, Accenture helped a common repository for the create Single Customer View, storage of audience interactions a next-generation data supply while simultaneously providing a chain and data lake built entirely number of digital capabilities to in the cloud. BBC Products, wherever they are myBBC | Accenture Digital Video helps BBC’s digital revolution get personal | 6 HOW WE DELIVERED Accenture began working with the Program Mobilization Accenture led the definition BBC in mid 2013 and was tasked and rollout of the program to support mobilizing the overall delivery method, developing Program Management program at speed and to support roadmaps and agreeing the the design and implementation of and Methodology governance approach. This was the myBBC engineering delivery Accenture supported the BBC crucial to meet the standards organization. This involved key with the skillsets and experience of transparency that are vitally Accenture personnel being to drive an effective approach important to the BBC and seconded into senior program to program management and involved liaising effectively roles in the short-term, fulfilling