Would you buy marketing information from BSkyB?
Jinfo Blog

24th May 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Credit reporting company Experian has recently disclosed that it has disposed of its hosted database service. Nothing particularly unusual about that – except that the buyer may come as a bit of a surprise; it’s the pay TV company BSkyB. Much detail still remains secret, but Brand Republic reported that the transaction was expected to be completed by 30 June (http://digbig.com/5bbqfw) and Research magazine quoted Experian as saying that the deal would enable it to ‘further tighten the strategic focus of its marketing services portfolio on core data and analytics’ (http://digbig.com/5bbqfx). Reading between the lines, both sources seem to betray some bemusement – even scepticism – about the motive behind the move. It’s fair to say that the divestment – which BSkyB will in any case run as a joint venture with Experian – still leaves Experian with a comprehensive portfolio of marketing services (http://digbig.com/5bbqfy). And last October Experian won a Best Practice in Data Management award for its work with BSkyB on the Touchpoint Walklist application, which improved customer uptake of TV services hawked door-to-door by helping the TV company reflect the household profile of the targeted prospects and tailor the sales message appropriately (http://digbig.com/5bbqga). So is this deal just an unusual business quirk, or should information managers care? Since television seems to be the only communication medium that isn’t going through a near-death experience at the moment, perhaps we should at least pay a little bit of attention. According to a recent Economist magazine special report, television seems to have defied almost all the conventional wisdom predicting its demise. It has adapted to meet threats from pirated online video and from digital video recorders that allow you to skip the commercials – and, recession or no recession, once people start paying for multichannel television, they apparently rarely stop (http://digbig.com/5bbqgb). One particularly penetrating insight from infopros’ point of view debunks the much-repeated prediction that people will cancel their pay-TV subscriptions and piece together an evening’s worth of entertainment from free broadcasts and the internet. This ‘assumes that people are willing to work three times harder to get the same thing’, according to one pundit – something that information managers might care to reflect on when considering cancelling a premium business information service and relying on the free web instead. What’s more, ‘cable and satellite firms know something that even Google does not: where their customers live', the Economist report continues. Addressable advertising has loitered on the horizon for years, it continues, but seems to be advancing at last (http://digbig.com/5bbqgc). Since BSkyB’s intention is not to keep its new service to itself, but to sell customer management services to hosted database clients, could we be witnessing the arrival of a new and unexpected marketing information supplier?

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