Transforming from a respected regional newspaper to a mass media company doesn’t happen overnight — or by chance.

Frederic Kachar, CEO of the Brazilian company InfoGlobo, walked INMA members through that transformation journey on day one of the INMA Latin American Conference, which is sponsored by the Google News Initiative.

The company began in 1925 with a regional newspaper, gradually adding radio (1944), magazine publishing (1952), broadcast television (1991), luxury publications (2000), and streaming services (2015).

“Now, we play in all platforms,” Kachar said. “Since 2015, we started to merge companies. We knew it was important to have scale in the digital world, and working the brands in synergy with each other is stronger than leaving them standing alone.”

Without the proper reach and scale, he said it’s difficult for brands to achieve national status. But in the current digital environment, merging the different brands has allowed InfoGlobo to achieve that.

“We believe we are a mass media company; all the brands are leaders in their segments,” he said. “Our events have national repercussions and the vision is that the whole is greater than the sum of our parts.”

He gave examples of how InfoGlobo is able to leverage advertising across its brands and products. A project for Microsoft about cybersecurity was a fit for InfoGlobo brands, including radio, podcasts, print, and the digital channel of its business publication, Valor Economico. A second project centred around climate change and environmental issues provided editorial coverage to more than 20 of the editorial brands at Editora Globa.

“As we combine different audiences and different products, we have the opportunity to sell more expensive projects,” he said. But he company knew it needed to shift to the digital world to keep pace with changing behaviours of its audience.

“It’s important to understand that change is something you have to keep in mind all the time,” he said. “We are always checking processes. And you have to understand the customer journey. It doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end.”

InfoGlobo identified three business pillars which were necessary to create change:

• Content creation
• Audience
• Advertising

InfoGlobo’s cultural transformation began with changing the culture of the company — “and that means the people,” he said. Before the company could change content, it had to change the way newsrooms think.

“Newsrooms used to have a broadcast mindset. We need people, but you also need to add data and A/B testing. That’s not easy, especially when you have editors who have been working with this mindset for many years. It wasn’t easy to change the mindset of many of them.”

By focusing on dashboards and showing the newsroom what readers want, the company gradually began to see changes. It decreased the amount of content it created and focused on meeting customer demand based on data — and saw pageviews jump.

“This was the result of the talent of people combined with data,” Kachar said. “The outcome was that we became the leader in all KPIs.”

Engaging the audience through digital methods was new to the company. For more than 90 years, it had based its audience decisions on newsstand sales and subscriptions. As it changed to a content distribution model and used paywalls, metred content, and exclusive content as ways to measure customer interest, it has had to keep an open mind and learn from the experience.

“We tried everything, and we are always changing because there are no defined rules for this,” Kachar said.

Its approach to advertising changed as well. Rather than being transactional, InfoGlobo created a sales consulting team that worked to understand the client’s needs and goals, and then offer solutions based on those findings.

The transformation is paying off, he said, although not everything is doing as well as they had hoped. Still InfoGlobo logged its most successful year in 2021, so Kachar said they are doing a good job overall – but still have much to learn.

“Everything is only possible if we change the culture,” he said. “It’s not only ‘fail fast,’ but ‘learn fast.’ It’s important to learn from the failures.”

The conference continues on Friday. Complete coverage can be found here.

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