Aiming to refresh its brand image and attract more male readers, the Hungarian publisher used its participation in Table Stakes Europe to start working on new types of automotive content, particularly around service and explanatory journalism. Success in this area has helped to build momentum for other experiments in the newsroom, from other focus audiences such as Wine and Tech, to a pilot around content monetisation.
Ringier Hungary – part of the Swiss media conglomerate Ringier AG – has a diverse array of media brands within the Hungarian market, most notably Blikk, the country’s most-read daily newspaper with a readership of 512,000, and its digital counterpart, Blikk.hu. The company’s other brands include entertainment and women’s magazines, and a prominent classified jobs website.
Ringier Hungary has been faced with a rare challenge in the news industry: a disproportionately low share of male readers. While many news outlets struggle to attract women, the celebrity- and gossip-focused content of Ringier’s high-reach product Blikk has drawn an audience skewing heavily female, but this also undermined the image and credibility of the publication.
Ringier’s TSE team decided to work on both. On the one hand, they wanted to lift the share of male readers to get more gender balance, on the other – and more importantly – their plan was to give their brand a serious facelift: from clickbaity and rather sensational content
to content people can use. The task at hand has been to keep growing while already being the number one in the Hungarian news market. To unlock new growth potential, the publisher’s team took a bet at attracting new groups of readers and at the same time ramping up on higher quality content.
When strategising about how to achieve these goals, the team first reflected on appropriate target audiences. Focusing on automotive, tech, and wine content was likely to attract primarily men, so the thinking went. But would it also work for the brand?
New formats for car content pay off
The team – headed by Chief Digital Officer Zsuzsa Kekesi and Blikk’s Deputy Editor-in-Chief Gabor Tibay – began working with the newsroom. In the Table Stakes spirit of testing and experimenting, content production in all three areas was to be stepped up. Between 80 and 100 pieces per week should do the job, the team thought. To produce a critical mass of automotive content, an editor was hired, and a licensing agreement with the digital content of Axel Springer’s Auto Bild closed (German Axel Springer used to be a joint-venture partner of Swiss Ringier).
First successes came in soon, particularly with the automotive content. But the team was not entirely happy. Eyeball-attracting content like exceptional car accidents brought clicks, but that was exactly what undermined the brand value, they thought. The newsroom was advised to exclude sensational content but focus on service and explanatory or mildly emotional content.
A big hit was conceived when the car brand Opel abandoned its traditional logo. The news came in as a simple press release, but a colleague crafted a story on the history of car logos that turned out to be engaging and stirred nostalgic feelings with many users who reminisced about their first or long-abandoned cars.
To keep women interested, stories with tips for car repairs were published, helping customers – most likely not only women – to not embarrass themselves in the shops. Within just three months automotive content became a signature section for Blikk, generating 150,000 page views per week.
Experiments with other audiences and monetisation
The team tried to recreate the success story with other audiences, namely people interested in tech and those loving wine. But they soon found out that every audience needed to be served in a different way. Sometimes different business models were needed. Wine, for example, proved to be much more of an advertising and e-commerce opportunity than being high-attention journalism.
Fortunately, the program’s results inspired others within the editorial team to start their own experiments. A video studio was conceived, mini-publishing teams formed to serve those interested in film and true crime.
A defining moment came when one colleague who in the past had been rather sceptical towards all things digital came around and specifically asked to become part of the movie recommendations team. Sometimes defining audiences helps newsrooms to bring hidden gems to the surface.
Table Stakes has set free plenty of energy to rebuild Blikk’s brand around the promise of short explanation and usefulness. Internal communication and data-driven decision making have become much more of a conscious process in the teams’ everyday lives.
There was even enough enthusiasm within the publishing house to start a paid content experiment – a new path in a company with a digital business that, until then, had entirely focused on reach. There was something to be done with all the loyal female users in the funnel, the team reasoned.
While men are now getting used to Ringier’s brands, women are about to take the next step: getting used to registering and paying for some of the offerings.