Company

Roularta Media Group (RMG), founded in 1954, is a prominent Belgian-French quoted company with over 1,300 employees. As the market leader in Belgium for magazines, RMG operates across diverse media sectors, including news, lifestyle, TV, professional publications, healthcare, regional papers, and digital platforms, making it a comprehensive and influential player in the media industry.

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Several years ago, RMG established an Innovation Department to tackle various future-oriented challenges. Trensition participates in STADIEM which is where the collaboration with RMG was forged. The project is ongoing as we speak.

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Trensition is part of the STADIEM ecosystem. Something to be proud of, knowing that the selection procedure began with 400 promising start-ups and only 4 were selected to implement the pilot phase (following the match, develop and integrate phases).

Strategic Question

How will the media sector evolve in the years ahead and how can we anticipate this more quickly and with more confidence?

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Objectives

• What trends will impact the media industry in the years ahead?
• What start-ups should be on our radar?
• What are leading companies doing?
• What trends are affecting industries of our interest?
• How can we steer our innovation roadmap?

Challenge

Media is a volatile, fast-changing and highly competitive industry. Traditional business models are being squeezed by the triple threat of declining audiences, paywalled content and the migration of advertising to new online platforms. An avalanche of changes is coming:

• New big tech market players in US & China are impacting traditional broadcasters.
• Consumers’ demand for TV and video consumption is undergoing a fundamental shift towards on-demand, online & streaming.
• Social media remains highly relevant, acting as a catalyst for other e-social trends such as influencers.
• Like in any industry, established players are increasingly confronted with digital disruption through maturing technologies such as 5G, blockchain, VR/AR, …
• Big data opens new value propositions through AI, automation and personalisation but also poses new challenges to confront e.g. (deep) fake news.
• …

RMG realises they must constantly reinvent themselves in order to survive. But how do you accelerate the innovation process and integrate future thinking and acting into your DNA while competing in a rapidly changing world and industry?

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As a corporation with over 1,500 employees operating in different regions with a variety of media offerings, it’s not easy to anticipate the future and act with agility.

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Solution

RMG’s innovation, strategic sales and research departments focus on what the world and media landscape will look like in about 3 to 5 years.

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Initially, the entire trend watching process was done manually by attending conferences, reading reports or specific online sources, and actively searching for relevant start-ups, scale-ups, and technology providers. RMG’s analysis relied solely on human expertise and judgement. A highly time-consuming and subjective approach with little guarantee for success.

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The partnership with Trensition enriched RMG’s human-based approach with 100% AI-driven trend insights, enabling RMG to objectify and prioritise trends in a mind-blowingly high-performant way.

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During an intense co-creation project, Trensition made an in-depth map of the international media landscape to gain a thorough understanding of the media industry and the challenges it faces. Based on those insights and taking into account RMG’s specific sector and region, we tweaked our innovative trend tracking platform Trendtracker to provide RMG with tailored strategic intelligence.

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In order for RMG’s innovation department to determine its strategic direction, Trendtracker continuously monitors the evolution of 118 trends that could potentially impact the media sector, clustered into the following 10 themes:

• Media
• Advertising
• Audio & Video
• Journalism
• Business Model
• Consumer
• Data
• Sustainability
• Technology
• Work

Trendtracker helps RMG gain a deep understanding of specific trend evolutions, looking ahead as well as taking the past 7 years into account.

• The Trend Strength Index indicates the current impact of a trend.
• The velocity reveals how fast a trend is moving in real time.
• Furthermore, our technology shows the likely timeframe for peak impact and the scope of that impact.
• Finally, we assign each trend to a specific action (recognise – observe – explore – strategise – incorporate), taking into account RMG’s situation.

Furthermore, RMG wants to take a leading role as a sounding board for their clients in key sectors. Trendtracker enables strategic sales to quickly identify key trends within various sectors. By providing relevant knowhow and sharing insights into trends affecting specific target groups and industries, RMG wants to help advertisers focus their advertising and native content approach in order to maximise the impact of their investments. A well-needed improvement given the current fragmentation of media spendings.

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Trendtracker also supports RMG’s research department that focuses on changing customer behaviour by providing objectified insights on trends impacting the consumer space such as the changing mindset of different generations when consuming media and news..

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All these specific use cases are fully automated as Trendtracker infuses RMG’s innovation, strategic sales and research process with 100% data-driven intelligence.

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RMG employees working in different departments (strategy, innovation, market intelligence, digital, research, strategic sales etc.) can access the online platform to gather insights 24/7.

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“Having a comprehensive, cost-effective, efficient, and continuous analytics tool for trend research is a gamechanger in RMG’s strategic decision-making process.” - Mark Daemen - Director Strategy & Innovation Advertising, Roularta Media Group

Impact

Trendtracker simplifies, accelerates and objectifies RMG’s decision-making process despite the rapidly changing media landscape.

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RMG gets 360° insights into:

• emerging technologies
• market-disrupting trends
• societal shifts
• shifting consumer preferences
• and many more trends that impact the media landscape specifically

Our proprietary AI algorithms are continuously unleashed onto large amounts of data to provide updated insights, fully tailored to the media sector, and faster and more accurate than anything that came before. Improved certainty means better results with significant gains in terms of time, effort and budget!

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“Trensition knows the difficulties and needs of strategy and innovation executives and how to provide these stakeholders with the data insights they need to make better strategic decisions.” - Erwin Danis - Director Innovation, Roularta Media Group