Advanced Social Listening Tool

The BBC is seeking a strategic partner to provide an audience intelligence and digital insight platform that enables a deeper understanding of public discourse, audience behaviours, cultural trends, and emerging issues across the digital landscape. The solution will support the BBC's ambition to make more informed editorial, marketing, communications, and audience engagement decisions through the delivery of timely, actionable insights.

As audience conversations increasingly span social media, search platforms, online communities, user-generated content channels, and emerging digital ecosystems, the BBC requires a solution that goes beyond traditional social listening. The successful supplier will provide a comprehensive capability that combines social listening, search intelligence, influencer analysis, audience segmentation, and AI-powered insights within a single platform or integrated solution.

The BBC seeks a platform capable of monitoring and analysing conversations across a wide range of digital sources in real time, identifying emerging trends, tracking sentiment, measuring campaign and brand performance, and understanding the influence of key voices and communities. The ability to combine social data with search behaviour insights is of particular interest, enabling a more holistic view of audience interests, intent, and changing behaviours.

A key requirement is the ability to deliver advanced audience intelligence and segmentation. The solution should enable users to identify, analyse, and track audiences based on demographics, interests, behaviours, locations, attitudes, and cultural characteristics, whilst supporting the creation of bespoke audience groups that can be monitored over time. The BBC is particularly interested in capabilities that enhance understanding of different audience cohorts, including generational segments and culturally relevant communities.

The solution should leverage artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to improve efficiency, automate insight generation, support trend forecasting, enhance sentiment analysis, and identify emerging risks and opportunities. Robust reporting, dashboarding, and visualisation capabilities are expected, with flexibility to meet the needs of a diverse range of users across the organisation.

Given the BBC's global reach and public service responsibilities, suppliers must demonstrate strong data governance, security, and privacy controls, including full compliance with UK GDPR and other applicable regulatory requirements. Integration with existing BBC systems and analytics environments is desirable, as is support for multilingual analysis and international audience monitoring.

Through this procurement, the BBC aims to secure a future-focused solution that will strengthen its audience intelligence capabilities, support evidence-based decision making, and enable a deeper understanding of the audiences it serves in an increasingly complex and rapidly evolving digital environment.

RFI can be accessed on SAP Ariba, here: eu.mu.ariba.com/uav/project/ ↗