EPISODE #

How more than 20 publishers are reinventing digital publishing together

Audience Development Deep Dive Episode 5: Dr. Christoph Mayer

We Like Mags and Purple in conversation with Dr. Christoph Mayer, Partner and Managing Director AI & Data Science at the management consultancy Schickler

When media consultant Dr. Christoph Mayer is most frequently asked by various publishers, "How do we read the data so that we can align our products and newsrooms with it?" it makes sense to explore these questions together in a working group.

Improving the digital business model together - with DRIVE

Mayer's focus is on regional publishers that compete with each other in marginal areas, but are all confronted with the same problems and challenges - both technical and personnel-related. At the center of this is another question, namely: How do I turn users into convinced subscribers?

This is how the idea for the DRIVE project came about. The basic idea of DRIVE is simple: Only a joint approach can help against the overwhelming power of Google, Facebook & Co. Around 20 newspaper publishers such as NPG Ulm, DDV-Mediengruppe and Mittelbayerische Zeitung are involved in the project. Mayer and his team are collecting data for these customers. Every user action on the websites is stored and managed and analyzed at Schickler. Even if not every analysis is relevant for some of the participating publishers, they still benefit from the collected results of all of them.

Mayer calls this "large-scale experimenting and shared learning." All findings and results are available for all publishers to see. It's a very transparent process that also allows publishers to work at a speed they were not able to before, due to a lack of both human and technical resources. Added to this is Schickler's expertise, with a trained view from the outside, to read the data in such a way that it actually leads to the target.

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