How media company Mediahuis leverages user preferences to optimize ads revenue

Mediahuis is a European media company with activities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany, and Luxembourg. Boasting an annual revenue of 980€ millions, the company mainly focuses on independent newspapers and quality journalism as well as audio-visuals, and marketplaces. As part of their strategy to personalize the customer experience, they decided to look into solutions to leverage user preferences for improved ads campaigns and choose Didomi’s Preference Management Platform to help them out with it.

We had the chance to discuss with Frederik Leirs, Product Owner Personalisation at Mediahuis, who came back on the different challenges faced by the company and his collaboration with Didomi.

Challenge: Implement a solution to collect and leverage users’ preferences

A few years ago and with the advent of consent solutions in Europe, following the GDPR, it became obvious for Mediahuis that users’ preferences were an opportunity to offer a more personalized experience to their readers and thus, to increase the quality and revenue of ads campaigns. 

When their IT team started looking into the options for collecting and using preferences, they thought about designing it themselves. But building this type of solution internally often requires allocating many ressources and can be very time consuming. In the end, the team ended up with the conclusion that this wasn't their core expertise, and that they should focus on journalism instead of building a technical solution to cover consent management.

After evaluating the different tools available on the market to cover Mediahuis’ use case for preference management, Frederik and his team chose Didomi because of the technical possibilities offered by the platform and the GDPR expertise of the company: 

“Since Didomi is there to help us out with it, we have a solid technical partner to help us with the knowledge of the GDPR framework within Europe, which also helps us to clear our minds and to keep focus on what's really important there.”

Frederik Leirs, Product Owner Personalisation at Mediahuis

Solution: The Preference Management Platform as a second consent

Mediahuis chose to collaborate with Didomi and to implement the Preference Management Platform on their news websites to collect and use readers’ preferences. In their case, the solution is used as a second consent.

First, when users visit one of Mediahuis’ news websites they land on a basic Consent Management Platform to provide their consent for personal data collection and processing (first consent). At a later point along the customer journey, Mediahuis asks for a second consent for ads purposes. A popup window appears and contains clear text explaining the purposes behind this data collection and two buttons: “Accept” or “Decline”. 

Then, if the user accepts, this second consent is combined with the information available on the user account such as their location, topics they’re interested in or even their age, and combine it all with other relevant information for better targeted ads campaigns:

“We simply store a consent with a certain user ID. With some export magic, we try to combine it with our own CRM data and parse that data to the data handling parties.”

Frederik Leirs, Product Owner Personalisation at Mediahuis

Results: 60% of positive consent and improved ads campaigns

Frederik and his team were expecting 66% of positive consent for the second pop-up window asking users for their permissions to use the information stored in their account. After a few months of test, the results are up to Mediahuis’ expectations: 

“We expected to have 66% of positive consents. It turns out it's 60%. This allows us to really match the account data we have from those persons with the behavioral data, which is in Piano or 6sense. Match that and parse it along in our advertising network for improved advertising data.”

Frederik Leirs, Product Owner Personalisation at Mediahuis

The results are still being analyzed to measure the positive impact on user experience and advertising revenue. Mediahuis is very satisfied with the personal follow-up and the solutions offered by Didomi and is already looking into using the Preference Management Platform for other purposes. 

If you want to know more about Didomi's Preference Management Platform, feel free to reach out to our team. We will be happy to help you and give you premium support!

{{talk-to-an-expert}}