Very contented and focused on building a truly global brand out of Africa, the serial entrepreneur and perennial optimist, Rotimi Pedro talks to Charles Ike-Okoh over drinks (just water) in his office about Bloomberg Africa TV.
The front door is propped open when I arrived at Rotimi Pedro’s office located in an expanse compound. My immediate thought is that it is a construction site. My thought was vindicated at the end of our chat when he took me on tour of the massive TV infrastructure he is building to accommodate one of his most ambitious project yet, Bloomberg TV Africa.
I had let him talk about the project and we spent over an hour on that. Rotimi’s tone is surely laced with excitement and he speaks fast but clear. It is now going past midday.
“The arrangement we have with Bloomberg is a localization project, we are trying to localize the brand and bring in more television media perspective. It is an experiential brand, coming from a financial data background. Bloomberg itself is already a news gatherer, perhaps one of the best news gatherer in the world,” he said.
Occasionally I interjected with a question, but I let him flow. It is a compelling tale that underscores the trend in Nigeria’s media landscape.
“What we represent is the television arm of Bloomberg and that is how we got empowered with Bloomberg’s news gathering capabilities. Today Bloomberg has 3,200 stringers across the globe and about 8 of them in Nigeria, writing news. That is the cutting edge advantage that we have and we are coming into the market with.
On that Bloomberg’s terminal, sits a lot of news and information and editorials about Nigeria, Africa that has never been published, never used because they were somehow not relevant to the international community. We are trying to pull those research information out and use it-, turning it into compelling television as opposed to just news.
It is not just enough to report the facts anymore, the facts are everywhere, it is the analysis and the quality of mind that you put behind the news that gives you the cutting edge. It is the quality of analysis that you present to any issue that will make the difference and that is what we are trying to do with Bloomberg Africa, to give it the depth.
There are camera positions in over 1000 locations around the world. That is the power of the network we are trying to unleash unto the market in terms of the depth and quality of people that can actually contribute to current issues that breaks all day long.
The model we are trying to work on is not a pay model. We are currently distributing under channel 411 on DsTv and it is free-to-air, you do not have to pay subscription that is, technically and we are not being paid by DsTv for that news. And the Bloomberg ethics is that we do not get paid for news, news is what we produce and that is what we are trying to bring into the market. The credibility is what we are trying to live up to and we would live up to it that is a mandate that we have.
We are trying to build a global brand from the African perspective and we are working with Bloomberg on the editorial control of this channel. Yes, Africa needs to be reported in the right way. A good example I keep giving all the time is that when we started this journey two years ago, we needed a still image partner and so we combed all the picture banks around the world to get images, AFP, to actually say ok you have enough stocked footage of Africa that can actually allow us to truly paint the right picture and for every 10 pictures, you get about eight negative and two positive images and that tells you something about how Africa has been reported previously.
We actually commissioned our own images because the stocked footage that we had from the existing ones were not representative enough of what we want to report.
I do not believe in pandering to nationalistic sentiments one way or the other; it must be factual, it must be reported right; the bad side and the good side. The truth is somewhere in the middle. What we are trying to do is to report in a balanced way as opposed to, “we are Africans, let us project the African Agenda.” No we are not projecting an African agenda; we are projecting the truth.
Yes we have a social responsibility to the community we operate in to actually make sure there is a wider responsibility to the progression of that community and that we would do, but the way we gather the news the way we report the news will be in the middle, it will be factually represented.
The power of Bloomberg is actually its terminus and the difference between us and our competition is that we are coming from an experiential background; an average audience, an average viewer for us would have actually experienced it, would have traded on the Bloomberg terminal, he would have risked his money based on the information he got from the Bloomberg terminal.
So we try to leverage on that credibility because that terminal is perhaps one of the most powerful terminals or information source in the world. We do not want to reinvent the wheel, we are going to have our own local approach to news gathering, but we are going to rely quite heavily on the existing infrastructures that the brand actually lent to us.
We have eight people that feed the Bloomberg terminal in Nigeria, about 26 across Africa, so we have enough news sources on the African continent already in existence.
Currently our footprint covers 200 million households in Europe, Middle East and Africa; 40 million households in Africa have access to the Bloomberg terminal and mind you, we are not just joined at the hips with DsTv, we are also on channel 328 on StarTimes and more platform. And we also intend to build on our local programming blocks on local terrestrial channels across Africa and we are building up our partnership base to actually deliver and achieve that.
This project is a franchise and a joint venture approach as well; Bloomberg have a part in our equity portfolio but not majority, just a very small part. It is an African operations and it is owned by Africans. We think we need a crossover platform, an international platform to be able to report Africa the way we want to report it.
If you look at our current content grid, we have started from the entertainment point; we have quite a number of lifestyle shows that are already on air. We have a program called ‘The Shift’, which is a technology program, a monthly program. We have African Business weekly, it is a financial program, and we have ‘football dynamics’, as you rightly guessed, our pedigree, a football analytics show; it analyses everything to the intellectual football followers to actually understand why Arsenal or Chelsea would have a twenty or thirty percent chance of winning the league. We are using the same actuary data all from the Bloomberg terminal to analyze a football situation.
We are hoping that will appeal to the football followers or audience that want a bit more than what happens on the field of play. We are starting a formula 1 analytics program as well called ‘formula 1 dynamics’. So the Dynamics brand is analyzing the data behind a sporting play. It is one area we want to focus on; even if it’s a lifestyle thing; we are trying to bring the intellectual approach to it as well. So the program balance will reflect that it is not only just finance. We are trying to make it a broad based business channel. Not just feeding you business information but trying to help you get more out of your lifestyle as well. So that’s what we are trying to do; to put it in one word, it is the CEO channel.
We started our soft launch at the last IMF meeting; the honorable minster for finance kicked us into the soft launch phase in Washington October 26th 2013 actually. We have been increasing our program grid gradually and we have about six programs running in the Bloomberg feed now. We are starting our live programming in July/August this year (2014) from Lagos, from this premise here. We would populate that grid to get up to four/five hours every day.
The reviews have been quite great. One thing we pride ourselves with is that we want to do it right. We do not want to cut corners in anyway because of the quality and integrity of the brand that we represent. The quality of our programs has been commended extensively. The program we produce; ‘African moments to watch’ is on the Middle East platform, ‘African Business Weekly’ is on the Far-East platform. They are taking African contents because of the quality we have been able to achieve.
These programs have been produced at very high quality standards, surpassing the expectation of Bloomberg itself that is why they now feed in those programs. So our primary vision is to do it right.
I think we play a social responsibility role by making sure that investors are adequately and properly informed on what they are getting into. And that is what we are trying to do, to make sure the information asymmetry is reduced in the market and any market where you have free flow of information, you can only get more efficient, you can only get better. That is what we think we need to do in the next two to three years.
Like in every business there is the downside, but I am a perennial optimist in anything I do; they say the only thing you do with the past is to take learning from it and not regrets; the only thing you learn from the present is to be contended. My only approach is to be optimistic; I never fear anything going forward. I look at the past; I do not regret, I look at my present and I am so contented and focused on what I am doing. If you look into the future, you can either see fear or optimism; I chose to see the optimism as opposed to what are the downsides or pitfalls; maybe that is my bane, I am an optimist. This would work. I strongly believe there is a place for credible information; a few people have tried it even in the broader journalism sense.
Yes Bloomberg sport, our ‘football dynamics’ show is going to the world cup. It is about data; Information that you will not get on the field. The data is already in the Bloomberg terminal if you are a subscriber. The data is there as well as the analysis
We have a carriage agreement with DsTv and on Channel 411; right next door to a lot of news channels like CNBC, Al-Jazera as well.
We have a license to do a direct-to home service but what we will not do is to actually go on the terrestrial route because definitely with the issue around digitalization, that market is coming to an end.
