The daily newspaper started its Table Stakes project with the aim of accelerating its digital transformation and leveraging its 10th-year anniversary event to increase its digital subscriber count. When the news agenda disrupted their roadmap, L’Opinion’s Table Stakes team quickly identified a new focus audience: people who want to make the most of their last 15–20 years of working life.

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.

The choice of target audiences within the framework of their Table Stakes Europe project quickly became evident to the Rossel Est Médias team. Operating in a region deeply attached to Champagne production, the group decided to address “those who make the wine and those who love it.”

Challenging conventional wisdom, the Abendblatt team’s journey with Table Stakes Europe has allowed them to prove that regional cultural content, when done well, CAN attract new digital subscribers. The successes of the culture desk are now inspiring change in the wider newsroom.

The French media company decided to target women working in the finance sector after identifying a critical gap in the demographics of their subscribers and event attendees. The aim is to help women build careers in finance by producing content that helps them create aspirational professional paths and by providing useful networking opportunities.

An important goal for Our Media during its participation in Table Stakes Europe was to start moving away from being viewed as a conservative medium towards being seen as a fresh, modern one in order to reach younger people. The publisher also wanted to increase engagement with its audiences by producing more high quality content. A key metric was to track the amount of time that their audiences spent with content.

The Austrian state-funded news publisher closed its printed paper during the Table Stakes Europe programme and overhauled its website and newsroom and used audience-focused experiments to test different formats of telling stories. The key goal: to reinvent public service journalism in Austria by moving away from the legacy of centuries-old print notifications to the boundless opportunities of deploying digitally-delivered news and information needed by Austrian audiences to make their lives better.

The German publisher’s second year in Table Stakes Europe allowed it to spread the audiences-first approach further in the newsroom, build on its existing audience-focused products and launch new projects.

During its participation in Table Stakes Europe, Grupo Joly’s digital team made a firm commitment to establish and encourage new habits in the newsroom by restructuring teams and improving processes. Thanks to the work done over these months, which has included new approaches to the use of data, holding meetings and the creation of internal playbooks, the company has a firm plan for approaching the future of digital media based on ongoing innovation and adaptation and, above all, without losing sight of the focus on specific audiences.

During its year in Table Stakes Europe, the German publisher created a successful new brand for food and gastronomy content and transformed its approach to covering local music festivals. These and other audience-focused efforts have dramatically improved their performance metrics and paved the way for future digital revenue growth.