If you’re not thinking digital first then where have you been for the last five years, asks Bloomberg’s Adam Freeman.

In light of this week’s launch of Bloomberg Business Europe, M&M Global caught up with Adam Freeman, managing director of Bloomberg Media EMEA, to find out about the company’s new digital-first destination.

Bloomberg Business launched in the US earlier this year and is now making its debut in Europe. The new platform will take a different approach to news, with a commitment to increase the customisation of Bloomberg products for distinct international markets to target today’s global, mobile business news consumer.

“Bloomberg is an incredible business with incredible content for its subscribers,” said Freeman. “It services the financial services industry amazingly well.”

But the business was never really run as a media company. Instead, it focused on in-house marketing. Since Justin Smith joined as CEO of Bloomberg Media just under two years ago, the company has been running with a “new remit” and a strategic focus on turning into a “proper media company”.

“To achieve that globally, it means you have to do that regionally and do it locally,” said Freeman.

“I joined 11 months ago to take that mission at a European, Middle Eastern and African level. I’ve spent the last 10 months fixing what was broken and creating our own strategic priorities and building a team to make that happen. This is our first step on that journey,” he added.

Moving audiences

As part of launch, Bloomberg has increased and refreshed its TV output for the region, but digital will be the most significant thing that it focuses on in 2015, according to Freeman.

“We’re broadening our audience focus from financial services to the business professionals. We’re creating a site that helps the business professionals of Europe make smarter, faster business decisions,” said Freeman.

To do this, Bloomberg will cover global stories. It already has over 2,500 journalists in approximately 70 bureaus around the world. This provides it with a huge scale of news, info and content.

“We’re going to tip a bit of that into the open and connected internet – socialising it and editing it for digital,” he said.

Digital business of scale

“Our television products are regionalised – they’re live 24 hours a day but it’s live from Hong Kong, to London, to New York and we pass the TV responsibility between the regions,” said Freeman. “Our digital product historically was the same, it was on size fits all – it was run from New York with a bit of local editing, but hardly any.”

“That’s not how you build a digital business of scale – you have to be geographically more relevant,” he added.

Freeman points out the importance of focusing on the differences in interests between audiences. For example, a businessman in London will care about completely different subjects to a businessman in Nigeria or Moscow.

“The strategy is fundamentally different, it’s about building regional business sites that contribute to a global proposition.”

“There will be one site with a huge archive and a huge platform, but the entry points are regionalised so that you receive the best experience of all of that content.”

‘Mobilegeddon’

The Bloomberg Business launch comes with what the press are labelling as “mobilegeddon”, the news last this week that Google made a major change to its mobile search algorithm that will impact the order websites are ranked when users search on their mobile devices.

But Freeman says that he was drafting the digital first strategy five years ago.

“As a publisher, if you’re not thinking digital first then where have you been for the last five years?” said Freeman.

“It should be no surprise to anyone that we’re saying we are going to build our audiences digitally first. That’s just where the audiences are.”

Freeman doesn’t think that going digital is what sets Bloomberg apart from the rest, but the new “free, open, and connected” element of the platform does.

“The more touch points you have with an audience, the higher their understanding of you and the quality of your relationship. Any publisher who thinks just because I create content they’re going to come to me is also about ten years out of date.”

Bloomberg Business will roll out across global regions over the coming months.