Actively shaping the media future in Styria Medien
September 27, 2012 by marek.miller
Wolfgang Bretschko, (picture by Brie Logsdon)
Wolfgang Bretschko, CEO, Styria Medien, Graz, a guest speaker at the INMA European 2012 conference in Hague spoke about the best ways to reach 20% of the revenue from own digital portfolio in 2015.
The digital world has redesigned the rules of the game both for the user and the advertising market in the media industry. Like most of the traditional media houses Styria has to face the big challenges resulting from the digital evolution. Instead of being paralysed by the new general conditions, Styria is actively approaching the arising business opportunities by investing strategically into transaction-oriented business models (e.g. marketplaces) and content- and communityservices (e.g. special interest portals). Combined with a true and reviving cultural change Styria will succeed in raising the percentage of turnover generated by digital business from 6% in 2011 to 20% in 2015.
As a media company Styria Medien has 3 core purposes:
- build trust
- faciliate orientation
- support community
Styria’s plan is to raise the digital turnover up to 20% (from 6%) in 2015. Ambitious goals motivate the team and foster change.
They defined 2 fields of action:
- content and community services
- transactional marketplaces
Styria’s content on community services means mostly the news portals they have. With news portals they managed to grow in 3 years from 26,1 million visit – 43,4 million (up by 66%). Their classifieds also managed to grow the audience: from 6,7 million to 22,4 million unique visits (+232%)
How they want to grow:
- organically (launches – develop business they already had)
- unorganically (acquistions)
Examples:
- Wogibtswas.at – to be launched in October. It’s a platform where people can find individual offerings near the consumers. It’s a hyperlocal combination of Groupon and Foursquare.
- Ligaportal.at – niche portal for regional soccer that was established by 3 persons that grew the audience very quickly. Styria Medien bought 49% shares in this company with hope for the full acquisition in 2-3 years.
They encourage cooperation within the group, within the different companies they have and different brands they own.
Some initiatives:
- Media Power of the Group (They offer a complete advertisement sollution. Their marketing agency pushed Styria to number 2 in Austria. Want to become number 1 in terms of traffic in Austria.)
- Traffic Eco System this measure doubled the Intragroup traffic within 3 months
- Premium publisher network (example of cooperation with competitors. Started a publisher network to attack Google. They managed to triple the revenue performance. Every newspaper in Austria is joining this cooperation).
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