“In product management, empathy for users is key. But in media, success starts with empathizing with  those who create the experience: journalists. Their work is the foundation upon which all product  experiences are built. Without understanding their needs and challenges, no product can truly  succeed.” 

Tell us a little bit about you & your background 

With a product background from the airline industry, I first entered the media industry 5 years ago. Thanks to my understanding of data, I began in advertising before moving into subscription. I quickly realized that editorial newsletters were the best-performing conversion tool, so gradually shifted my focus there, putting my product knowledge to use again. 

At NZZ, where I work now, they were looking for a product manager for their newsletter portfolio – perfect! So I joined 4 years ago. Today, I’m responsible for the entire editorial product development.

What is “Editorial Product Development”? 

Editorial Product Development aims to establish a new way of working that respects journalism while making it more audience-centric.

The concept bridges the gap between editorial and product teams. This takes more than alignment meetings and shared goals. It requires a role that speaks the language of editors while thinking in product principles.

Enter Editorial Product Development! It brings together product- and editorial-minded individuals to align newsroom workflows with audience-driven strategies while preserving editorial independence. It translates the needs of journalists into product  solutions and ensures that decisions empower the newsroom rather than burden it. 

Building this Editorial Product team 

There are 3 editorial-minded individuals in our team. One focuses on digital workflows, such as homepage curation, planning tools, push notifications, etc. The second is the Newsletter PM, who previously worked as a newsletter editor and therefore has operational experience of what works and  what doesn’t. Finally, we have the Editorial PM for off-platform work – an essential perspective for any new product development today. Each of them spend 2 days a week in their original editorial roles and the rest of their time in a more product-focused role within my team. We sit next to the classic  product team, who manage the website and app features – while we focus on making the content come alive. 

A powerful combination

You have strong UX professionals coming from product, who deeply understand user needs and how to act on them. At times, their deep empathy can lead to a strong user-first perspective. Journalists offer a valuable counterbalance. They come with a clear story to tell and a drive to share it, even if it’s not always based on detailed user research. 

Bringing these two mindsets together – such as having a journalist step into a product management role – creates a powerful blend. It’s the kind of balance media companies need to serve both their audience and their editorial mission. 

How to pick the right journalist 

There are journalists who quite simply love the craft – they want to write the story, produce the video, or create the podcast, but aren’t particularly interested in what happens after publication. They are essential! People ultimately come to us for our stories, no matter how great the product experience is. However, they are not necessarily the ones who will thrive in product roles.  

Others are curious to go beyond content creation. They ask questions about target groups, business  goals, and internal processes. These journalists show potential for working in product. Bringing them into product roles not only increases the chances of success but also fosters greater acceptance and cultural change. 

“Media companies cannot afford to treat product development as separate from editorial realities.  The best digital products come from organizations where product and editorial teams co-create rather  than operate in silos. Empathy makes this possible – empathy not just for readers, but for the people  who bring the stories to life every day. If we want to build truly impactful media products, we must  start by understanding and supporting them.”

The team’s work in practice 

When launching a new audience feature, an Editorial Product Manager doesn’t just look at  engagement metrics. They also analyse how it impacts storytelling and how it fits into the workflows and constraints journalists face under tight deadlines. This understanding is crucial for developing products that support rather than hinder the newsroom. 

One case study involves opinion pieces. User research revealed that while some readers – especially younger audiences – prefer unbiased facts, others enjoy opinion-based content. However, many readers couldn’t distinguish opinion pieces from regular articles. One idea was to display the editor’s  face in the teaser when it’s an opinion piece. Here, Editorial Product Managers played a crucial role,  particularly in two ways: 

1. The cultural aspect: We needed editorial buy-in. Not every journalist is thrilled about having their picture attached to an article. But if the idea comes from someone within editorial who understands their work, it’s received much better than if a “product guy” comes along with post-its  and user-centric arguments. 

2. The process aspect: We had never used photos of editors at article level before. We needed  support from the photo editorial team to source consistent images. Because Editorial Product Managers already know these workflows and backend processes, defining requirements and  moving forward took half the time. 

What does success look like for Editorial Product Managers? 

Our work contributes to overarching business goals, such as increasing subscription or advertising revenue. Success is measured using journalistic performance metrics, depending on the initiative – such as article completion rates, content recirculation, or user feedback. Ultimately, engagement is our  key success indicator. It drives conversions and prevents churn. Engagement thus serves as a proxy for harder KPIs like subscription sales and cancellations, which it significantly influences. 

Success is also about empathizing with journalists: helping their stories gain the value they deserve from both audiences and the business. Journalists sometimes feel that their role is becoming less important – when in fact, the opposite is true.

Journalist, Writer, Consultant and Professor specialized in Digital Media, Ismael Nafria Mitjans has published multiple books diving into the strategies of successful digital subscription media businesses, including Argentina's Clarín.

Speaking at The Audiencers' Festival London, in June 2024, Ismael shared 5 secrets behind the leading Spanish-speaking media subscription's success. If you speak Spanish, you can learn more about Clarín's strategy in Ismael's book, Clarín Actualizado. 

1. Strategy

Clarín’s team holds an annual meeting, defining specific goals and a multi-year strategy. Of course, this is nothing new – most businesses have strategic meetings – but Clarín ensures this is translated throughout the whole business, influencing everything they do as a company. It has, for instance, led to some of their most successful projects, including Club 365 (their membership), their big data team, registration strategy and the newsroom re-organization.

Just like The New York Times, they also establish public goals, ensuring they’re held accountable and that everyone in the company sees this as a set target to achieve. For instance, in 2023 they settled on:

• 500,000 subscribers (2023) – they achieved this, so their new goal is 1 million subscribers

• 5 million registered users (2023)

Strategic positioning was to completely transform the company:

2. Registration & subscription

Clarín’s strategy was to launch digital registrations first and subscriptions later. The idea here was to be able to understand their audience and willingness to convert before asking readers to pay.

To begin with, they launched the so-called “silent registration” in 2014, but this wasn’t enough, so they committed to blocking content with registration walls.

The move to registration was a significant change in the Argentinian market, so they decided to make this decision hand-in-hand with their main rival, La Nación, considering it as a strategic move for the future of the industry as a whole.

On February 1st 2015, Clarín and La Nación launched user registration: a new stage for digital journalism in Argentina.

The signwall or registration wall was based on a metered model, which allowed a certain number of articles to be read each month (20 at the beginning) before users were asked to register. Thanks to the registration, it was confirmed how essential its most loyal users were for Clarín’s business. It changed the vision of the business, creating a new culture of audience development across the whole company.

Evolution:

• September 2015: half a million registered users
• April 2020: 2.4 million registered (and the group’s sports daily, Olé, 765,000 registered)
• End 2023: More than 5 million registered users

The registration project, which was later joined by the digital subscription project in April 2017, has had a major impact on the reorganization of Clarín’s editorial work.

3. Big data team

One of Clarín’s goals has to become a data-driven company in which all decision-making is based on data. According to Ismael, it’s one of the key differentiators between Clarín and other media houses, especially in the Spanish-speaking world.

Interestingly, the publisher’s Big Data team was born not out of the technology team but from the business team, to support the development of Club 365, Clarín’s membership offer. Building and growing this Big Data team to help collect and process information to support teams across the business in a variety of ways, it gave Clarín a huge advantage from an early date.

Today, dashboards are part of the day-to-day work of multiple departments and professionals at the newspaper, both in the business areas and in the newsroom.

4. Newsroom organization 

Since the 2008 paper and web merger, successive reorganizations have been made according to Clarín’s objectives. The most recent (2022) defines two main objectives, divided into 4 editorial teams:

1. Attracting new subscribers and retaining existing subscribers

• Politics, Economy, World and Paper
• Society, Sports, Entertainment and Zonals
• Loyalty

2. Reaching large audiences (advertising, new users, relevance)

• Massive audience: Breaking news, SEO, social networks, front page, video and photography…

5. Decisive notes

To boost digital subscriber acquisition, Clarín‘s editorial team has worked on a very interesting journalistic concept, internally named “the decisive note”, designed to convince users to subscribe to the newspaper. 

When asked why a user becomes a subscriber, the internal “decisive notes” document explains that “there is undoubtedly a factor of adhesion to the brand”, but that subscription does not occur “without shock” – i.e. without a user finding that they can’t access certain content without paying. 

This “convincing process can be long,” although “the decision is usually impulsive”, made “by wanting to access an article with differential value and a unique focus”. “These articles are the decisive ones,” and without them “there are no subscribers.” 

Management at Clarín worked on defining this type of content to ensure journalists are producing enough of these articles.  The idea was to find an appropriate balance between free access news and “decisive notes”, which would be restricted to subscribers-only

> To read more about this topic, check out Ismael’s article on Clarin’s decisive notes.

Homepage management, balancing decisive notes and free content

For Clarín, the homepage is “the gateway for subscribers and loyal users, those prone to subscription” 

The team must therefore “privilege its own content with a singular focus, even in urgent news. The decisive notes must have a continuous and important presence in the first scrolls.” – in short, the decisive note articles will always be top of the homepage, taking center stage.

Within the first scrolls:

After a few scrolls:

“Of the 500,000 daily visitors to the homepage, those who enter more than three times a day do not reach 5% of the daily average. And more than 40% only visit the homepage once a day.” 

“We must be very careful in maintaining our decisive notes in privileged positions to be able to show them to the 95% of users who visit us between 1 and 3 times a day.”

Latest numbers and trends

The paywall is already the second largest revenue source (above digital advertising) and is on track to become the top revenue source by 2025.

Digital revenues are expected to account for 55% of total revenues by the end of 2024.

Digital revenues already pay for all offline and online media salaries (approx. 1,000 people).

.

Marc, you’re the Senior Director, what exactly does your role cover? What kind of decisions do you make, and which ones don’t you? And above all, my favorite question, what are your success indicators, the ones you get up for every morning?

In practice, this involves a lot of decision-making, some very fundamental, such as which direction we should take as a business for digital development, others more trivial, such as which color we should use for the background of a pop-up.

But, each time, I try to make decisions with some humility, because the only privilege our experience confers on us is the ability to make assumptions. At the end of the day, for every decision, the final word, the answer, must emerge from the communities we serve.

Although my career has mainly been on the editorial side, I no longer make day-to-day decisions on content. I leave this to the editors, publishers and journalists in our group to guide their coverage, shape their stories and deliver them to our audience. However, I do make sure to share my ideas and observations with the editorial team with the goal of helping the organization in its quest to better serve readers, growing both reach and subscribers.

The indicators I’m most concerned with are those that reflect brand loyalty. Whether it’s engagement time, recirculation, number of subscribers to our newsletters… anything that demonstrates that our offer meets (or doesn’t!) the needs and expectations of our audiences is of the utmost concern to me. That and subscriber revenue, of course!

Note: since this interview, Marc has now also taken on the responsibility of Publisher of Soleil, the largest title in the group. 

Four years ago, the group was in a very bad position. Can you explain where you were, and why?

In 2019, we had a single owner who, while investing in our digital growth, quickly ran out of resources to sustain the pace of development and withstand the crumbling advertising market.

By the end of summer 2019, we were on the verge of bankruptcy. Without emergency assistance from the Quebec government, the 350 or so employees of our press group would have been out of work, and six regions of Quebec and French-speaking Ontario would have seen the disappearance of a century-old publication that has played a huge role in their history.

Our owner was forced to step down, and an interim administrator was appointed to manage the organization while we searched for a buyer.

Marc, what was the decision taken to ensure the survival of your titles? And can you tell us how you came to this decision, and in particular, what paths you took to reach it?

A number of potential buyers showed an interest in our group, but only one project showed any real potential of sustainability – a collective ownership, born from the support and action of our employees and communities.

In our six communities, people rallied around the project to create news cooperatives. Businesses, readers, family members and organizations have contributed financially to the project.

At the end of 2019, the court finally granted us ownership of the company, and institutional backers gave us their support. That’s when the Coopérative nationale de l’information indépendante (CN2i) was born.

Kim, what did this decision mean to you? How did it change your daily life?

The biggest benefit of the relaunch was that it meant we could keep the regional publications that make our communities shine, whilst also contributing to democracy in our communities. Of course, it also meant I could keep my job and get involved in the company in a different way. Right from the start, I was appointed to the Board of Directors. So, in addition to my day-to-day work, I was actively involved in setting up a new management model.

In concrete terms, what was the first step you took? Marc, as Senior Director, and Kim, as Digital Growth Coordinator?

Marc: When CN2i was formed, I was editor-in-chief of La Voix de l’Est, the group’s smallest media outlet (and North America’s smallest French-language daily). 

In the first few months of our new coop’s existence, I took the role of Digital Team Leader for the entire group, a brand-new position whose mandate, among other things, was to work on developing our digital subscription strategy, a project we hoped to achieve within 12 to 18 months of our coop’s launch.

But that was without knowing that a global pandemic would slightly disrupt our plans.

Kim: I was officially appointed Coordinator in January 2023. My first task was to train the teams for the new CMS, which was very different from our old one. Although the training was mainly technical, I made sure to infuse the mentality shift into the training sessions, but above all to accompany teams following this in deploying new platforms. At the same time, my involvement in the Board of Directors gave me the opportunity to install the new cooperative model in the company. The first step was undoubtedly to understand the mechanics so as to communicate them effectively to members.

What was actually quite easy?

Marc: I wouldn’t say it was easy, but I have to say that COVID-19 and all the health restrictions imposed on us from March 2020 served as a catalyst for our digital transition.

It wasn’t long before the group’s management decided to stop printing and distributing our weekday print editions and keep only the Saturday one. With virtually all shops and businesses closed due to health regulations, our print editions were virtually ad-free. Delivering ad-free copies every day would have quickly squandered our financial resources.

It was also at this time that the decision was made to accelerate the launch of digital subscription offers, which we finally achieved at the very end of November 2020.

We had conservative targets for digital subscription, not really knowing how it would all evolve. But at the end of our first full year of a new business model, we had 2.5 times as many subscribers than we’d hoped.

It proved what author Simon Sinek says, that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Our communities have recognized the unique, precious yet fragile nature of what we have to offer, and they’ve let us know by subscribing.

But the hardest part is ahead of us. It’s not the first 100 subscribers that are hard to win, it’s the next 100, and then the 100 after that. Over time, we need to redouble our efforts to convince people of the value of our digital content and products.

Building a digital subscription model takes a lot of time and patience!

Kim : Change is never easy. We’ve been through quite a few over the past few years. On the other hand, our communities’ attachment to their media has been tremendous, and it’s given us wings to fly through the trials and tribulations.

What, on the other hand, has been much more difficult than you imagined?

Marc: Internally, I’d say it was breaking our habits. Most members of our organization learned their trade in a context where our main product was a daily printed newspaper. Deadlines, and creative and editorial processes (in short, our entire work organization) revolved around the industrial and logistical imperatives of printing and delivering a printed newspaper. 

Embracing digital storytelling modes where we have to consider that our readers are not a homogeneous block, but rather a tangle of communities made up of audiences with needs and habits as varied as they are numerous, is not so simple. Even if everyone shows good will, and understands that it’s up to us to adapt to user needs, habits quickly take over when the pressure mounts.

Kim: Marc describes it very well! The change in people’s work habits hasn’t always been effortless. It’s totally normal and human! We all work very hard together to support the teams, train them, and use their formidable expertise to shape it in a changing context. The aim is to be agile, test and innovate.

What lessons did you learn when implementing your new CMS (ArcXP), and how did this help in your digital transformation?

Marc: I would say that the biggest lesson learned is that there is no finish line. Implementing a new CMS is not like printing a newspaper. There is no finished product. It’s a process. A long process during which you have to make some decisions on what is a priority, what is not, during which you have some landmarks and some hiccups. There is a moment when you say: “It’s good enough” and you go live. And then, the real implementation process, through testing and learning, though optimizing and innovating, begins.

Our digital transformation journey is pretty similar. We still have a lot to learn, to discover, but we will do so through the contact with our audiences within the communities that we are building.

One of the most crucial points in your transformation was the switch to digital subscription: can you tell us about what you put in place and the results you achieved?

For the first two years following the launch of our digital subscription, we had a fairly static metered paywall strategy. Anonymous readers were offered three articles a month, logged-in users six, and subscribers had full access.

Since our switch to Arc XP in April 2023, we’ve adopted a dynamic paywall strategy thanks to the implementation of Poool’s paywall solution, Access. This has enabled us to explore new ways of engaging readers and capitalizing on their interest in our content, whilst maintaining a metered model similar to the one we had before.

In particular, we tested a non-blocking wall that appears whenever an anonymous user arrives from a search engine. Instead of blocking with a paywall, we first ask them to subscribe to a newsletter in exchange for access to the content with the goal of increasing engagement and allowing them to discover our title. The result: our newsletter mailing list grew by 26.3% in the first month, and 66% in the following three months. This enables us to develop a relationship with these users and, in the long term, higher chances of convincing them to subscribe.

If you were to relive this period, what would you do differently?

Marc: Communicate better and more, admitting to others, and to myself, that I don’t have all the answers. The more I learn about the digital world, the more I realize that I don’t know anything. Worse still, the more I realize that what I took for granted just a few days ago can evaporate in an instant.

The digital ecosystem is eminently volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous. We’re all looking for predictability and certainty, but that’s virtually impossible these days. Our efforts, ideas and resources are just some of the many variables that determine the success or failure of a project. There are so many external factors that can influence our operations, we can’t help but run out of steam trying to predict and control everything.

So, if I were going through this period again, I’d want to know that from the start and be able to communicate it to my fellow cooperators. 

Kim: Marc makes an excellent point: communication. We’re a communications company, but in the end we may have been a bit of a shoemaker with a bad shoe. However, it’s important to remember that all these transformations have taken place in the context of a pandemic. We’ve come a long way in our remote interactions, and we now have mechanisms in place that make communication faster and more efficient. 

If I were to talk to one of your employees who was there before your digital transformation, and who is still there now, what would they tell me about the evolution of the company?

Marc: That nothing is simple, without a doubt! And that sometimes things don’t move as quickly as we’d like. But that’s part of the cooperative concept: you have to know how to rally people around major issues and decisions. We have to do everything we can to ensure the cohesion and unity of the group in order to carry out our mission of providing local information.

Kim: There are many different answers! Certainly, the change is phenomenal, and yes, it’s not moving as fast as we’d hoped, but it is moving. I believe that, above all, our company is a source of pride not only for our community, but also for the workers who own it. 

What are you most proud of?

Marc: I’m proud that we gambled on direct user contribution, and that our subscription figures have proved us right. 

With the decline in traffic from social media, volume-based revenue sources are under pressure. In the case of subscription, it’s engagement that fuels growth. So I feel that everything we’ve been building for just over three years means we can look to the future with more confidence.

Kim: To see how far we’ve come! We raised this company from the brink of bankruptcy, and now we’re working at arm’s length through the various stages of this digital transformation. That makes me really proud! Our communities are behind us, and that’s an essential driving force for the future.

What advice would you give to a media group embarking on a similar project?

Marc: Trust yourself! A collective project like ours requires a lot of commitment and adaptation. The roles are often ambiguous, with employees having to wear several hats. It requires a great deal of indulgence, patience, communication and transparency. And for that, you need to have confidence in yourself and in your partners.

Kim: You have to have a plan, but be agile. You also need a lot of patience and kindness, because changes always bring their share of discomfort and challenges. You have to be ready and resilient.

190 years of family-owned business, with 6,400 employees working at over 140 subsidiaries across 19 countries and nearly 80% of EBITDA coming from digital… What can Ringier’s success in adapting to, and thriving in, the digital world tell others hoping to do the same?

To maximize their chances of success, the Ringier group established the Global Media Unit (GMU) 2.5 years ago for their general media – which is one out of three business pillars, besides Digital Marketplaces and Sports Media. The unit was built by Ladina Heimgartner as Head Global Media together with Patrick. Made up of 10 executives, most members wear 2 hats, that of their position in the GMU and another playing a more operational role within one of the publications. This allows them to have contributions from experts on a range of topics, covering every link in the media group’s value chain. 

The Global Media Unit goals

• Knowledge exchange: we’re facing the same strategic challenges in every country. We’re better off discussing them together and sharing best practices as well as potential solutions rather than sitting in silos. One of Patrick’s examples was the end to third-party cookies, hence the 1st party data initiative (discussed later in the article) 

• Support through expertise: provide support through experts to all markets, but also the other way around, creating a place to exchange with those working within individual titles, and also benefiting from the corporate power in terms of business, market and trends research

• Access to technology: scaling technology as a group, with cost sharing, such as through Ringier Connect, a Single Sign On solution which is also related to OneLog

• Strategic guidelines: define strategic guidelines to roll out to the whole group, for instance guidelines for maximizing the potential of AI 

But the most important goal is growth. 

For Patrick, COO of the GMU, and the rest of the board, growth is all about building a ridgid user funnel. 

“Growth is all about the funnel”

This concept is fairly new to the group, only introduced when they started talking about registered users and paywalls some years ago, but it has been an increasingly more important way of thinking for growth. 

Why? Because this funnel brings together the two most important digital revenue streams – advertising and subscription. 

As the reader moves through the funnel, they become more engaged which means higher advertising revenue thanks to better targeting, and higher propensity to subscribe. This is particularly the case with registration, a key step in the funnel for Ringier publishers. 

In fact, many titles in the group launch a registration model as a strategy in and of itself before moving to subscription. As Patrick highlighted, media is one of the few industries that doesn’t require readers to register. We need to make it understood that registration doesn’t hurt, it’s actually for the benefit of everyone, both readers and media. But it’s not easy to convince internal teams who often need to be educated on the market context – such as the end to 3rd party cookies – what this means and how strategies such as registration can provide a solution. 

Blick.ch, for instance, can be a role model for titles who are yet to move into digital subscription. As a traditionally reach-strong title, they’ve always been prudent to move into the subscription space because of concerns of the effects of this model on traffic. 

Will registration and subscription damage reach, leading to losses in advertising revenue?

No. If you do it in an intelligent manner you can succeed in both, which has been one of the biggest learnings for Blick, starting with registration before recently moving to subscription with Blick+. 

And this is one of the other benefits for Ringier. Every title is at a different stage of building steps and moving users deeper in the funnel towards high ARPU, but the group provides a space for publishers to learn from one another, always taking into account the local context (although, ultimately, in the bigger picture, we’re all facing similar challenges and the solutions aren’t too dissimilar). 

For example, whilst Blick has only just launched Blick+,  Onet Premium from Poland, has recently launched a bundle, bringing together all their portfolio. 

The 5 R’s of digital transformation

To support these funnel-building efforts and help Ringier titles succeed in digital transformation, the GMU has developed a 5-point strategy framework and built a KPI dashboard with the goal of ensuring that each title is focusing on the developments that will ensure sustainability.  

1. Relevance of the brands, also in comparison with how the rest of the market is performing, measured by weekly online reach and social engagement

2. Reputation of the brands, measured through brand trust and core web vitals

3. Reach – high traffic rates, specifically monthly active users (MAU), monthly share of users > 4 sessions and ranked print reach

4. Revenue – advertising and subscription, of course, but also print, commercial, etc. measured by EBITDA margin, ARPU, sales growth & print sales growth

5. Resilience, both in terms of diversifying revenue and sources of traffic to not be dependent on a single stream, making the titles more resilient to market changes or situations like Covid. This is measured by # significant revenue streams, logged in sessions / total sessions, average time spent / session and healthy traffic

“I am convinced that if you want to succeed as a media brand in the long run, you have to be strong on these five dimensions. And that has become even more true in the context of generative AI.”

Patrick Rademacher

These KPIs are used to build a dashboard clearly indicating the strategic positioning of a title, ultimately helping teams to make more informed decisions, clearly identify where their strong and weak points are and put the work into developing in the right direction. 

So far, the KPIs are only being measured for larger titles as it takes some time to establish and measure the metrics effectively, but a spider web graph gives a good picture of where work is needed for those using this framework so far. 

How do GMU do this effectively with so much diversity between titles?

Traditionally, all markets have a strong local management, but the GMU also aims to foster collaboration and use the learnings from each title to support others facing similar challenges. 

So, they established the GMU senates, bringing together the key decision makers in each field from across the group – advertising, editorial, business development, audience development, product, tech and digital user market. The attendees not only discuss topics of prioritization, learnings and best practices, but also work together in their specific field to align and make common decisions together, with one person from the GMU taking the lead. 

The GMU also organizes an online conference twice a year, bringing together the 120 top media executives at Ringier for a half day knowledge-exchange event with an agenda filled with – internal and external – experts discussing the most important initiatives and projects.

Finally, there’s the GMU initiatives, with roughly 30 projects running at a time, such as the AI, gamification and 3rd party cookies/1st party data initiatives. 

For example: 

The 3rd party cookies/1st party data initiatives

In Patrick’s opinion, there’s a huge gap in knowledge within the whole media industry on the importance of first-party data as well as where a title can collect it and put it to use. 

Some markets are already in the game and collecting data, they just need to put it to use in talking to readers in a more personalized way to move readers deeper down the funnel. But others haven’t started de-anonymizing yet. 

The goal therefore is to close this gap within the Ringier group, making sure that everyone is at the same stage of understanding the context of the end of 3rd party cookies and how they can work towards a solution.  

There are 3 streams to achieve this: 

• Tech – What kind of technology do we need to gather this first-party data? Hence the launch of their technology OneLog / Ringier Connect, for example, to create a single sign-on for readers for the whole media portfolio within a market 
• Product – How do we make sure that we can make use of this data to improve our products? Making use of feedback and analyzing reader behavior etc to make sure products satisfy their needs. 
• Advertising  – How can we make use of 1st party data in terms of advertising, in a responsible, transparent and compliant way? This depends on the tech solution and local context – where the publisher is in their development of the funnel, coming back to diversifying revenue streams. But the topic of bringing together different kinds of data from different sources (e.g. registration vs cookie consent vs subscription) is complex 

What about the AI initiative? 

Patrick is also co-leading the Ringier Group AI Board, together with Petra Ehmann, Chief Innovation Officer. This board was installed by the Ringier Group Executive Board in May. The main objective of this board is to coordinate AI-related activities within the Ringier Group, ensure knowledge exchange around AI, drive promising AI initiatives and define guidelines.

The mission of the AI Board: “We empower the implementation of AI in our products in a responsible way”.

As one of the first media companies, Ringier introduced Group-wide AI guidelines shortly afterwards.

So far, the AI Board is conducting and collecting learnings from general use cases group-wide, defining KPis to evaluate success, and looking at the wider context to see where AI could be most valuable. 

For Patrick, there are 2 main fields for putting AI to use: 

• To support internal processes, gaining speed, improving quality and being more efficient. For instance in translating text
• To build better products that are more suitable to the needs of readers and help achieve the publisher’s goals

Patrick believes that (generative) AI will have a significant impact on the media industry, and he sees a big positive potential of AI for journalism and for the media business in general. At the same time, Ringier is also very conscious of the responsibility that comes along with this new technology, especially when it comes to transparency, journalistic quality, and the trust that our readers and users put into us.

> Patrick recently shared more on the topic of AI and guidelines at Ringier in an article published on INMA’s blog