Partner Insight Of The Month: How DPG Media is reinventing itself for the digital era
DPG Media is a media company encompassing major television, radio, print and online outlets and is one of the founding partners of Start it @KBC. Their vision is to connect people and enrich their lives with media that inform, inspire and entertain. Positivity, creativity and passion are among their core values. Everything they do starts with the customer, and they are continuously improving the quality of their media to better serve their viewers, readers and listeners and respond to their needs.
That constant drive for improvement is exactly what companies need to adapt to the fast-changing realities of an increasingly digital future. DPG Media is at the cutting edge of media technology and a major proponent of 5G. The transition strategy at the heart of their digital acceleration focuses on scale (leveraging their scale to maximise synergies), redesigning the core (perpetuating the success of the brands by investing heavily in digitisation) and new business (growing their online services). By transforming their organisation from the inside out, they are a model for how legacy formats can reinvent themselves for the digital era.
The numbers don’t lie
DPG’s efforts to keep up with the pace of change are paying off. The company is growing digitally in the double digits: in terms of reach, usage, logged in reach, readership, advertising revenue and online services. HLN: the digital news leader (website and app) reaches 2.6 million people a day and has grown 20 percent this year. HLN Live gets 280 thousand views per day. VTM GO has grown 57 percent this year in unique monthly users for its long form videos, while short form video views have grown 68 percent (across channels). Twenty-one percent of their radio public listens online.
In times of COVID-19 DPG Media’s strong brands are proving their usefulness for society more than ever. VTM Nieuws for example, which reached a record number of viewers on October 30 when 1.12 million viewers followed the broadcast announcing the new lockdown. Other outlets reached record numbers of daily users seeking updates on new restrictions.
Agile leadership is key
Rapid change demands agile leadership. DPG Media’s agile teams work autonomously, grouped around different domains. That means that for most initiatives there is no project manager. These are only deployed to coordinate big initiatives covering multiple areas or departments. Best practices are shared within the community and different teams can consult the community on how to approach different issues.
Currently DPG is setting up competence centres to give experts in their field more room to influence and innovate. Experts are also deployed flexibly in function of cross-company priorities, ensuring their professional development and giving them extra motivation. Looking forward, the company wants to focus even more on multi-disciplinary teams that work together to put products on the market based on clear objectives and deadlines. These agile operating principles form the basis of their ambition to create world-class products centred around the needs of the consumer. The goal is to do this in an efficient way where assumptions are checked early in the process, leading to less waste of time, money and energy.
Working in cross-divisional teams enables rapid change across the organisation. It’s also key for the business and IT sides to determine the digital agenda together. Ultimately it’s about looking beyond traditional silos and collaborating towards ambitious targets driven by consumer needs.
How is your company gearing up for the digital era? Find out more about DPG Media here.