Head of Audience Research

Package Description

Job Reference: 21204
Band: E
Salary: £58,000 - £72,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.
Contract type: Permanent role 
Location: Office Base is London or Salford. This is a hybrid role and the successful candidate will balance office working with home working

We’re happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your choice under the flexible working question in the application. There is no obligation to raise this at the application stage but if you wish to do so, you are welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage. 

Excellent career progression – the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.
Unrivalled training and development opportunities – our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.
Benefits - We offer a negotiable salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 25 days annual leave with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care and gym. You can find out more about working at the BBC by selecting this link to our .

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Job Introduction

BBC Audiences are excited to be recruiting for a Head of Audience Research in the Digital Audiences team - a permanent, full-time role, based in either the London in Salford office. The successful applicant will ensure that audience insight, data and thinking are central to all major strategic decisions across the BBC to drive growth of our online audience across the UK.

Within the BBC, the Audiences department is central to providing high quality insight, performance data and inspiration to help decision makers at all levels. Critically, we act as an agent of change within the organisation, putting our audiences at the heart of decision making and future strategy. 

As a senior member of the Digital Audiences team, the successful applicant will play a critical role in shaping the future of the BBC, providing evidence and inspiration to stakeholders across the organisation in support of the BBC’s digital transformation and its significant digital growth ambitions. 

An interest in new technologies and media behaviours is desired, as well as proven experience in using audience data and insight to drive change within a complex organisation. In this role, you would be an active part of all of the work that the team undertakes, with an opportunity to shape our future roadmap.

Main Responsibilities

The Digital Audiences team is responsible for the supply of audience insight that helps shape the BBC’s overall strategy with regards to its audience facing digital offer.

We look at how audiences engage with our online offer today, and how a BBC of the future can better deliver value to licence fee payers through an industry leading set of digital services and capabilities. 

We bring inspiration from the wider media market and digital landscape, spotting opportunities to create new and innovative experiences for our users, as more and more audiences become digital first in their media behaviour. 

We use a breadth of audience and market data to bring these opportunities to life, from industry data sources including Ipsos Iris and BARB, as well as internal tools and data systems that help tell a rounded story for BBC Online. We also use desk research, tracking data and other audience tools to best align the BBC’s digital activity within the context of broader BBC objectives. 

Because of this, we work with stakeholders across the organisation, including Product, Distribution, Strategy and Editorial, to bring to life the needs of our current and future users. We collaborate with research and insight professionals across the BBC – from Data Analytics experts, Data Scientists, Audience Planners and UX researchers to tell a joined up story of our users. 

Working with Strategy and Audiences colleagues, we also help to define and bring to life the BBC’s digital goals, and track and report performance against these across a range of internal forums and levels of seniority.

As a leader within the team, you will support and lead the provision of audience insight that informs the longer-term digital strategy of the BBC, including:
• Identifying, exploring and communicating the BBC’s routes to digital growth in order to hit the stated growth ambition for BBC online. This could be through target audience groups, emerging behaviours, unmet needs or other growth levers we are able to pull to encourage more audiences to habitually use our digital services 
• Bringing audience and market inspiration from the wider digital media landscape – helping to spot new opportunities based on how audiences are engaging with new formats, services and technology platforms, and what that might mean for future media behaviours and the BBC’s distribution strategies
• Analysing and reporting on audience data (e.g. from BARB, Ipsos iris, Compass, Analytics), including deep interrogation of the data - often in conjunction with data scientists - if the research question requires. Part of this role will also include close collaboration with colleagues across Audiences and other insight functions, ensuring alignment of data use and application to our matrix range of stakeholders

The role reports to the Portfolio Head of Audiences for Digital, and will play an active role in supporting and developing the other members of the Digital Audiences team – 2 Research Managers, 1 Senior Research Executive and 1 Senior Data Analyst in order to deliver against the team’s objectives. 

Are you the right candidate

The successful candidate will excel in turning insights into powerfully communicated, actionable results using a thorough understanding of online audience behaviour.

You will have the proven expertise as a strategic thinker, and with relevant skills to guide the work of creative strategists, data analysts and research specialists to uncover new insights that inform digital growth.

You will also have the influencing and collaborative skills to work with virtual teams across a complex matrixed organisation, and you will have stakeholder management skills to build strong relationships across the BBC to guide decision making.

You will want to lead on some of the biggest audience questions affecting the BBC today. You will have strong knowledge and skills in data analysis and working with audience measurement systems and data sources to answer complex questions.

Key Criteria: 

- A thorough understanding of and interest in the UK’s changing media landscape, particularly around evolving digital behaviours and distribution strategies 
- Demonstrable thought leadership and influencing skills 
- Excellent stakeholder management and engagement skills
- Strong people and project management skills, and the collaborative strengths to work with multi-disciplinary teams to deliver high quality projects that shape online strategy 
- Effective delegation, communication and presentation skills

About the BBC

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC for different reasons and they will be given priority consideration ahead of other applicants. Priority consideration means for those employees seeking redeployment their application will be considered alongside anyone else at risk of redundancy, prior to any individuals being considered who are not at risk.

We don’t focus simply on what we do – we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us. Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours .

Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all of our employees to thrive and achieve their full potential.

We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to be part of the BBC – whether that’s to contribute to our programming or our wide range of non-production roles. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity.

We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles, unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.