Digital Media Europe

Melanie Deziel is an award-winning branded-content strategist, consultant, and speaker who travels the world educating marketing, sales, and editorial teams on branded-content best practices.

Deziel started The Overlap League native ad newsletter, writes the New Media Navigator column for Inc, teaches social media for Syracuse University’s online Master’s program, and is on the board of the Native Advertising Institute. She is the former director of creative strategy for Time Inc. and was the first editor of branded content at The New York Times, where she wrote the sponsored content pieces that won the 2014 and 2015 Best Native Advertising Execution OMMA Award, including the acclaimed “Women Inmates” piece for Netflix.

Lea Korsgaard is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Zetland, a Danish media company dedicated to journalism as a force of good, now counting more than 40,000 members and 50+ full-time staff. Lea spends most of her time navigating the intersection between journalism, creativity, technology and business development. She is the author of several books, among them the highly praised The Media User’s Manual to the Age of Lies. She is also chairman of the board at the Danish School of Media and Journalism, DMJX.

Gareth presents the BBC World Service technology radio programme Digital Planet. Each week he and his guests discuss how technology affects people’s lives around the world. The show is broadcast worldwide to several million people and downloaded by thousands of others who enjoy the extra chat in the podcast. With a degree in Electronic Engineering from Imperial College London, Gareth transferred to a media career about twenty years ago. He has appeared on BBC TV and radio as a presenter and commentator on myriad aspects of science and technology. Away from the mic, Gareth is a lecturer on the renowned MSc in Science Communication at Imperial where he teaches radio journalism alongside the theoretical aspects of radio drama and documentary. Gareth also delivers transferrable skills training to early career academics to help them communicate their research. Around a thousand PhDs and postdocs have attended his popular short courses. As a moderator, Gareth has travelled widely, keeping conversations going at meetings of the World Economic Forum, European Commission, NewCities, Government of Estonia, UK Higher Education Academy, Wellcome Trust, Nesta, Imperial College Tech Foresight and many others.

Sophie Rohringer is Audience & Analytics Manager at DuMont’s publication “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger“. In this role, she provides dashboards, reportings and data analysis to the newsroom, marketing and management, enabling them to make data driven decisions in their daily work. She is also part of the strategic team focusing on optimizing paid subscriptions. Taking part in Table Stakes Europe 2021, Sophie and her team are working on creating audience centric workflows within the company to drive a sustainable growth in digital subscriptions. Her role allows Sophie to combine her journalistic background, analytical mindset and her passion for digital journalism.

Christian Röpke is CDO of DIE ZEIT. His main responsibility in this role is that of Managing Director of ZEIT ONLINE and academics.

These are the respective companies, in which the business models of paid content, digital ad sales and digital classifieds of DIE ZEIT are managed and the leading website www.zeit.de is published. Especially the strong growth of digital subscriptions has fueled the transformation of the business model of ZEIT ONLINE in recent years.

Before joining ZEIT ONLINE as Managing Director in 2009, Christian has worked in various management roles in digital media, e.g. at Financial Times Deutschland and Gruner + Jahr.

Besides being the architect and chief coach of our Table Stakes Europe programme, Doug Smith is an adviser, writer, thinker, historian, teacher, lawyer and inventor with a broad range of experience. Acknowledged as one of the world’s leading management thinkers and advisers, having contributed to performance results, innovation, strategy and change in scores of organisations across more than sixty industries in all three sectors: private, government and non-profit.

Doug is the architect of the principles and design for Challenge-Centric, Performance-Driven Transformation Programmes (SM) guiding leaders to use a focus on performance results to drive innovation, capacity-building, and growth in organisations and communities undergoing profound disruption.

Digital professional with +8 years experience in the media and advertising industries. Board member of Rossel Advertising (Groupe Rossel), former board member of Le Soir. Throughout my career, I have developed a strong capacity to make things happen by managing programs and projects on strict timelines and budgets with cross-functional teams, numerous business units, stakeholders (from operational teams to C-Level) and external partners involved, always driven by a final user-centric vision. While growing my marketing and product development skills and mindset, I have also developed a strong technical sensitivity as well as a passion for ergonomics and graphic design for media products. Being very curious, adaptative, demanding, rigorous and persistent, I thrive only within environments full of learning opportunities, facing complex digital transformation’s challenges impacting people, way of working, clients, processes, business models and technologies.

Estefanía Nicolas is leading the digital transformation process working with all editors in chief in Diario de Navarra. Her entire professional career has been linked to digital product & business development. The last 12 years she has worked in the identification of information business opportunities and solutions defining the go-to-market strategies segmented to customer needs at Thomson Reuters as Marketing and New Business Director in Spain and New York and Digital Strategy Director at Grupo La information where she is working since 2015 leading sales and marketing strategies for all acquisition and performance marketing.

Live is editor storytelling and feature journalism, Dagens Næringsliv, Norway. Live has been central in developing the first couple of “content universes” across DN’s publishing platforms. Prior to joining Dagens Næringsliv thirteen years ago, she worked at VG.

Kate Baker is a Creative Lead at Google Brand Studio in London. She has 15+ years experience in the design and communications industry and has worked with Google for over 4 years, helping to craft everything from editorial, films and books to experimental new interfaces, toys and installations.

Ole Werring (MBA and MA) is Head of Product at Amedia in Norway. He has previously worked as a management consultant with expertise in strategy analysis and implementation, innovation processes and leadership. Werring has background from several Norwegian media companies, among others as Director of Strategy and Innovation at Tun Media AS, Head of Digital at Nationen AS, Project Manager at Dagbladet AS, and Head of Innovation at the Norwegian Film Institute. Werring is participating in WAN-IFRA’s Media Professionals Programme (MPP) as mentor for media companies and professionals in Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar. Werring holds an MBA in Global Leadership and a Masters Degree in Media Science

Esther coordinates the definition and implementation of eldiario.es membership programme. A programme addressed to a community of more than 56.000 members which continues to grow. She is responsible for the digital marketing strategy and loyalty programmes, as well as coordinating the fundraising and public relations team. Along with the development team, she designs and coordinate the technological and product development strategies. Esther has more than 14 years of international work experience and has focused most of her career on advocating social causes like child poverty, education or public health. I am an expert on digital strategies, social innovation, digital transformation, social marketing, fundraising and campaigning.
eldiario.es is a digital news site which has become a major reference in current affairs for a new generation of Spanish readers, and also a pioneer in high quality content and innovative business models.

Paddy is the Digital Editor of The Irish Times. He has worked for The Irish Times since June 1996, having first started with the newspaper’s website. He was appointed as Breaking News Editor in 1999 and Online News Editor in 2008, during the integration of the print and online newsrooms. He was appointed Assistant News Editor in 2009, Homepage Editor in 2013 and Digital Editor in 2015.

He has also written on motoring-related matters for The Irish Times and a weekly column for the Life & Style page of the newspaper.

Specialties: New media, old media, and everything in between. Cars and motoring, when he gets the chance.

Jessica Bulthé is currently working as business partner in the data team of Mediahuis Group. Mediahuis is an international media company with several news brands in Belgium (i.e. De Standaard, Nieuwsblad), The Netherlands (i.e. NRC, Telegraaf), Ireland (i.e. The Independent, BelfastTelegraph), Luxemburg (i.e. The Worth) and soon in Germany as well. In her current role, Jessica has a main focus on the data strategy of the B2C side of these news titles and how data science can support how a subscriber is converted and retained. In a more distant past, she received a PhD in computational neuroscience and was working as data scientist at Volvo Group and at Mediahuis.

Jan-Bart Vervenne works as a data scientist for the Data & Insights Team of Mediahuis Group. He has mainly worked on data projects with B2C as end-customer, focusing mainly on churn prediction as a pillar of more data-driven retention policies.

Edward Ho is a senior data scientist at Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), responsible for the conception and creation of data products in the area of customer management and marketing. He designs experiments in collaboration with business stakeholders which measure and optimise the customer marketing approach.
Prior to NZZ, Edward has over a decades’ worth of experience from a range of industries including Credit Suisse (banking), eBay (e-commerce), Sunrise (telecommunications), Auto-ID Labs (internet-of-things) where he built data products to help businesses make better decisions.

Patrick Rademacher is Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at Ringier Media Switzerland. He has been with Ringier AG since 2017. From 2017 to 2023, he supported the Group CEO in the digital transformation of Ringier, most recently as Head of Special Projects for the Group CEO. In this role, he managed strategic projects for Ringier, including the Swiss Digital Alliance. From 2020, he also was engaged in building up Ringier’s Global Media Unit, from 2021 to 2023 in the position of COO.

Juan Jurado works as a Data Scientist at El Confidencial, based in Spain. He is mainly focused on subscriptions, improving customer experience and managing analytical decisions. He has been working on acquisition and retention strategies, churn prediction and funnel optimization through experimentation projects.

Before El Confidencial, he was a Data Product Analyst in a finance-tech company. Juan also holds an MBA and Masters Degree in Marketing.

Jose A. Navas is head of the subscription product at El Confidencial. His current role involves defining the strategy for the user revenue business and working with different areas, such as editorial, commercial, design, development, optimization, and marketing. Former journalist, his career has been linked to product development for the last ten years. Prior to El Confidencial, he worked as a product manager at El Mundo and Mediaset Spain.

Johanna Molander is Business Manager for New Business at Svenska Dagbladet, part of the Schibsted News Media group. In her position, Johanna is responsible for operating and developing SvD’s commerce project. With over 10 years of experience in the field, Johanna will share her insights and learnings from running commerce projects within the news publishing environment.

Ingeborg Volan is editor for publishing strategy and visual journalismat Dagens Næringsliv, Norway’s most prominent business newspaper. Previously, she held the position of director of audience engagement. She’s an online news veteran who early saw the possibilities of reaching audiences better online. She’s very passionate about understanding news users and letting their needs shape journalism. Among other roles, Ingeborg has previously worked as the first head of social media at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) and lead the NRKbeta innovation crew. She’s also taught digital journalism at the Norwegian Institute for Journalism, been head of newsroom innovation at Adresseavisen and president of the Norwegian Online News Organization.

Jan Stian Vold is a Norwegian journalist with more than 20 years of experience in the online news business. He was the news editor in Bergens Tidende from 2014 to 2020 and is currently working as a project lead in the same media house. Amongst his recent responsibilities is the so-called Boligrobot – a new and sophisticated way of presenting automated text from the real estate market in and nearby Norway’s second-largest city.

Peter Sigfridsson is a journalist, project manager and now Head of production development at Gota Media AB. Gota Media AB is a media group in south Sweden with 11 local subscribed titles. As Head of production development Sigfridsson is responsible for the development of editorial and commercial workflow and production software at Gota Media AB.

Rudi Beck started his career in 1977 as a compositor at a German printing company. Ever since then, he has been working in several different areas of the publishing industry, experiencing firsthand its evolution from letterpress print to fully digital systems. He’s been working close with Klambt Verlag for many years, and in October of 2020 he was hired as their DAM Administrator to prepare Klambt for the future.

As Business Development Director, Øystein Syversen has been with FotoWare since 2004. During these years he has been deeply involved in the customer dialogues when transforming FotoWare to a dynamic ‘SaaS first’ media workflow and DAM solution with focus on API integrations and role-based user interfaces.

Mikaela Jaconelli is the Director of Client Success at Tipser – an embedded e-commerce scaleup on a mission to revolutionize the discovery and buying experience of products online. With around a decade of experience in retail, business, e-commerce and client management in corporate roles and a brand advisor freelancer, Jaconelli fosters the long-term relationships Tipser aims to have with its clients. Before Tipser, she has worked for Ericsson and Sony Music Entertainment.

Rolf joined Naviga in May 2019 after the company acquired Zinio, where he was Senior Vice President of Product management at the time. Prior to Zinio, Rolf was Managing Director & Co-Founder of Audience Media, a leading developer of multichannel software solutions for the media and publishing industry, which was acquired by Zinio in 2014. Prior to founding Audience Media, Rolf was Director for Global Media at eZ Systems, an open source Web CMS provider for the media industry and worked for 5 years at FIPP, the worldwide magazine media association as Marketing & Research Manager in London.

Karin Söderlund joined Naviga from the Infomaker acquisition, where she was CEO. She started her first company, Camedia, at the age of 28. It became a trusted partner for the publishing and media industry in the Nordic region. In 2004, Karin founded Onmedia, which provided online training for the media industry. In 2010, Karin joined Infomaker as a partner and Director of Professional Services. She became COO in 2014 and CEO in 2017. Karin has a master’s degree in graphic engineering from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and studied leadership at Stockholm School of Economics Executive Education.

Christian is founder of Transmatico and responsible for client relations and finance. He holds a degree in aerospace engineering, and has been an entrepreneur in the media and software environment for 20 years. He founded “aerosecure” – a B2B database for aviation safety – and “classmarkets” – a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider for classified marketplaces, and led both companies to exit.

Christian Arm is an entrepreneur with a professional attitude to achieve common goals. He is an expert in Digital Media Business, Big Data, Smart Data, Business Intelligence, Advertising, Product Management, Business Development and Digital Marketing. Goldbach neXT is the main centre of expertise for digital advertising products, technology, data and programmatic services and a 100% subsidiary company of Tx Group (previously known as Tamedia) & Goldbach and the first spin-off since the start of the Tamedia Advertising – Goldbach alliance.

Daniela is the Director of Media Sales at the Saarbrücker Zeitung, the leading daily newspaper in Saarland with seven editions. First published in 1761 as the Nassau-Saarbrückisches Wochenblatt, the SZ is today a modern multimedia firm with a daily newspaper, magazines, advertising leaflets, digital editions, successful websites, digital services, apps, and IT and logistics services.