Advertisers and business TV providers clashed over the best way for financial news channels to build audience numbers and advertising revenue in Asia at the Bloomberg Television roundtable last week.

Speaking at the forum in Singapore, a veteran advertising industry executive said that business channels needed to prove to media buyers who placed Asia’s $14 billion annual ad spend that they “owned” the region’s affluent and influential business people. However, music channel MTV’s managing director for south-east Asia Peter Bullard said that business TV providers should follow his company’s lead and localise their offerings to individual markets to build audience share.

Chief executive with media buyers Starcom Worldwide D Sriram had a different point of view. “You need to have a unique audience. You have to define what your offering is to this audience,” he said. Business TV needs to define its proposition to Asian audiences in the same way that the regional business titles did – catering to affluent, educated business decision makers and senior management, he said.

At the roundtable titled - Does Asian Business TV need a makeover held at Bloomberg Television’s Singapore bureau, Bullard said, “We learned that the Madonnas and the Britneys did not unite youth across Asia. Implementing a policy of strong localisation, combined with entertaining content and packaging that was relevant to viewers, was a turning point for us and I think business TV should look to apply that model as well.”

Tokyo-based regional managing editor with Bloomberg Television Brian Martinez said that among the 24-hour business channel’s most successful markets were Japan and Malaysia. “We have a 24-hour Japanese-language channel, and in Malaysia we have separate English, Bahasa and scheduled for July, a Tamil-language dedicated programme on two terrestrial channels. What is clear to us is that localisation, combined with the resources and insights of a worldwide financial news operation, is working for Bloomberg Television in Asia at the moment”.

In contrast, BBC World's Nic van Zwanenberg, head of network development, Asia said that his company’s approach was to offer viewers global insights based on the corporation’s worldwide operation. Standard & Poor's head of Asian equities Mark Matthews say that he wanted more “gossip” on business TV. “There is too much concentration on institutions. I would like to see more focus on retail investors in Asia. People here like to manage their own money. But they like to get their information in a more gossipy style – like who’s on top and who’s not. I think at the moment the business news providers are trying to satisfy both the retail investors and the professionals.”

Matthews and Bullard both averred that Asian-focused business news providers need to make their product “sexier and more entertaining” while not trivialising the product. Matthews and van Zwanenberg also noted that Asian viewers like to be entertained, but they also demanded a certain authority and maturity from news anchors. Martinez said later “Call it the grey hair factor – but viewers want to think that the anchors telling them this important information wasn’t born yesterday,” according to an official release."

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