BBC Worldwide, 2007

Communications across BBC Worldwide's digital portfolio, including BBC.com, TopGear.com and BBC Motion Gallery, alongside the launch of BBC Worldwide's YouTube channel itself: one of the earliest major media brand activations on the platform.

None of it had a template yet. YouTube didn't have an established idea of what a broadcaster's channel was for. TopGear.com was still working out its own identity, separate from the TV show it sat alongside. BBC Motion Gallery meant a different audience again: commercial licensing of BBC archive footage, not consumer content.

Working across broadcast IP and digital distribution at the same time, before the two had properly worked out how to talk to each other, meant learning early what most of the industry only figured out years later. A format doesn't survive the move online by simply being uploaded. It has to be rebuilt for how the new audience actually behaves.

You learn more from being early to a platform than from any case study written about it years later.