Making headlines

Providing 24-hour credit crunch coverage, keeping advertisers happy and staving off the competition – its all in a days for CNBC CEO and President for EMEA, Mick Buckley, who tells Diana Milne there’s no better time to be in the media game.

“Every story we cover has global implications and the adjustment to the brand reflects this”
-Mick Buckley, CNBC

IT’S Wednesday lunchtime at CNBC’s London studios and Mick Buckley is having his photograph taken against the backdrop of an interactive map showing live coverage of Europe’s stock markets. As the photographer snaps away, the numbers on the colour-coded map, which features in CNBC’s daily news broadcasts change by the second. “This doesn’t paint a very good picture,” jokes Buckley as Europe turns an ominous shade of red behind him and the minus numbers rack up.

Later, watching intently as a bank of screens show CNBC’s global market coverage, he describes how dramatically he has seen events across the world’s economies unfold – and the complexity of providing coverage of this for his viewers: “The speed and the extent of the financial crisis and now the economic crisis has taken everybody by surprise. This has been a global story that has broken out in the most unexpected of places. Nobody could have predicted for example that Iceland would have become the centre of the story at the time that it did. It’s also been a complex story to explain to our viewers. It’s fair to say that regulators, senior business people and viewers have been challenges by the complexity of some of the financial instruments involved.” And for Buckley and his team there is no margin for error. “We have a huge responsibility to actually get our coverage right,” he says, pointing out that CNBC’s audience accurate and fast information is vital.

The channel is broadcast to over 340 million households worldwide and the bulk of its viewers are also newsmakers – business executives and financial professionals that rely on the data CNCB provides to make crucial commercial decisions. “We’re not a general news channel with a broad based audience,” says Buckley. “Our audience is made up of senior, multi private investors and financial professionals. They have a pretty high base level of understanding of financial issues. They get it. In terms of what they want its data. But data is available everywhere so what we seek to give them is the story of what’s behind that data – what are the big macro trends by sector.”

Success story
Not surprisingly these professionals’ appetite for this data has grown in today’s economic climate and CNBC’s viewer figures are soaring. Its programmes are now available in over 400 million homes worldwide, and in the past ten years its monthly viewing figures have risen from 1.7 million to 6.7 million. In 2008 its viewer figures in the US alone grew 30 percent and as a result it experienced double digit revenue growth. “From a television point of view we’re having our best audience levels for 20 years,” says Buckley. Our websites have been going now for 18 months and the audience levels have doubled in a very short period of time. In October we had 400 million page views to our global website.”

Feeding this insatiable appetite for data means providing round the clock coverage of the world’s financial markets online and on television in real time as the financial markets of Asia, Europe and the US open and close. In a typical week 850 senior leaders are interviewed on the channel and CNBC’s reporters, based in 21 bureaux worldwide,  are on the front line when the big business stories break. It’s difficult for Buckley to pick out coverage of an event that he is particularly proud of but he highlights the channel’s reporting of the Shanghai stock market crash in February 2007.

Describing the moment when the Shanghai Composite Index dropped sharply in one day following rumours in the market about the capital gains tax being increased, he said: “The market drop was towards the end of the day in Shanghai so we instantly had to get our bureau network in Asia on the case. And immediately the story was happening live on CNBC. By using our bureau network across Europe we were able to tell that story as markets opened and closed and business leaders and CEOs were coming on the channel to give their perspective of what this meant. The story started at 9am London time and for us it finished at 10pm London time as the US markets closed. It was a day when CNBC’s global strength in terms of our bureau network and technology and fantastic team of journalists and back up technicians came together to produce the very best coverage of that story.”

Globalisation and the domino effect of the world financial crisis means CNBC has had to adjust its coverage so that it appeals to an international rather than regional audience in each continent where it operates – the collapse of the Shanghai stock market being a case in point. With this in mind, last year the channel removed regional tags from its operations, re-branding CNBC Europe as simply, CNBC to reflect the increasing demand for pan regional and global business news. Its European operation continues to broadcast nine hours of EMEA specific programming a day, however the channel is now treated as a global operation that broadcasts news about every region to every region.

Describing the shift that led to this move, Buckley says: “When we launched the channel 10 years ago there was a need to differentiate our European programming, but since then so much has changed in the way we do business. Every story we cover has global implications and the adjustment to the brand reflects this.”

Feeling the heat
But this global news coverage doesn’t pay for itself – advertising revenue is the channel’s lifeblood and the channel is as vulnerable to the economic downturn as the companies whose stocks are plunging on the newsroom’s interactive map.

Its growing viewer figures however, ensures the channel remains a powerful platform for advertisers and for now Buckley remains confident that there will be ample commercial revenue to pay for the news content CNBC provides. In 2008 it achieved 20 percent year on year growth for Europe, the Middle East and Africa and it has experienced compound growth in advertising revenue of 28 percent since 2006. Buckley says he expects growth in 2009 to reach around eight percent. “I’m very attentive to what’s going on with our advertising sales. But at the moment things look pretty good for this year,” he says. “We’re not in a local country retail advertising space. We’re an international channel and we have a really good diversified portfolio of advertisers from a sector point of view as well as from a regional point of view.” He goes on to say that its advertising clients include IT giants such as IBM and BT Global Services, financial services providers such as Deutsche Bank, Qatar Financial Centre and Allianz and energy companies, including Shell, and Exxon Mobil. CNBC also attracts advertising from luxury services and products manufactures, such as watchmakers, Omega and Rolex, who are attracted to the channel’s lifestyle programming, such as CNBC Life which is broadcast at weekends and is according to Buckley “A combination of high-end travel, luxury sport, entertainment and current affairs.” Describing the programming schedule, he says: “The weeks are about how to make money and the weekends are about how to enjoy the money you’ve made

Despite the fact CNBC is currently 40 percent ahead of its main competitor Bloomberg, in terms of annual viewer figure it is nonetheless operating in a fiercely competitive market however, made even more so by the proliferation of digital television channels and online news coverage worldwide. Buckley’s response to this is to ensure CNBC remains sharply focussed on its target audience.” With fragmentation in the digital space it’s really important that you have a valuable niche. And we have the most valuable audience in television. We have an audience that everybody aspires to in terms of their quality. We are happy understanding who that audience is and programming to their needs.”

Buckley goes on to explain the profile of a typical CNBC viewer: “Our typical viewer is male and aged 45. They have a huge network of contacts and a salary in excess of £85,000 and a net worth of £500,000. These viewers are c-suite executives, financial professionals and private investors.” And he says he has no intention at present of trying to reach a wider audience – given the appeal of this one to CNBC’s advertisers: “I’m happy growing the audience but the reason why I wouldn’t change it is because digital fragmentation has made that audience more and more valuable to advertisers. We’ve seen significant growth in our advertising across the last five years.”

Commercial considerations
Getting the balance right between pleasing advertisers and providing original content to viewers is a challenge for any media organisation, however Buckley says CNBC has achieved this offering not just “spot advertising” but the opportunity for customers to sponsor programmes slots and organise business to business events around the billing of a show. Shell for instance has sponsored CNBC’s daily Questions for the Future show and organises post-screening business-to-business events in different countries in conjunction with the programme. CNBC also has a division called Creative Solutions which produces bespoke content for advertising clients and works with them to ensure they “ It’s really about mixing traditional television advertising with real sold and effectiveB2B communication,” says Buckley.
His understanding of the commercial process stems from the fact that his background is in the business not the editorial side of media. Before coming to CNBC Europe, he was an executive vice president for news channels at Turner Broadcasting where he spent eight years. “My background is actually commercial and I’ve worked in television all my career in a variety of different places,” he says. However, while the pressure is on for Buckley to bring in the big bucks from advertisers  - he says the most stressful part of his job is being first to break the big stories.  “I wouldn’t describe this as a stressful job because it’s something I really enjoy. Clearly the biggest pressure of the job is the responsibility of making sure that our coverage is the best.”

As our interview comes to an end the banks of television screens in the gallery flicker on with news of the latest developments in the financial crisis.

Meanwhile Buckley returns to the job of supervising a 24-hour news operation, where the cameras never stop rolling and where, in today’s economic climate, no media operator can afford to pause for breath.

Mick Buckley was appointed to the role of President and CEO EMEA of CNBC in August 2004, having previously been Executive Vice President & Commercial Director.

Prior to joining CNBC, Mick spent eight years at Turner Broadcasting Systems Europe, where he was Executive VP, TBS News Networks and UK Managing Director. He held a series of distribution and sales roles for a number of Turner channels including CNN and its entertainment properties. He left TBS to pursue the “Advanced Management Programme” at Harvard in 2002. He graduated from the University College of Wales with a BSc honours degree in International Relations and Strategic Studies.  He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Mick lives in Surrey, is married with two boys and in his spare time manages a local soccer team.