DPG and Roularta media companies have a few things in common:

• They have numerous brands.
• They have moved to a single sign-on for subscribers.
• They encourage family sharing of that sign-on.

But they differ in one key area: DPG focuses internally and externally on being one company, one brand. Roularta embraces its multi-brand culture.

Executives from both companies shared how this looks at their Amsterdam offices with 27 members of a recent INMA study tour as part of its Media Subscriptions Summit. 

DPG: one log-in, one brand focus

DPG Media is what it is today mostly because of acquisitions. Its 80+ titles include magazines, news sites, podcasts, online insurance services, TV, and radio.

“We are focused on operating as one company, which is a challenge because we bought all these companies,” Chief Marketing Officer Bert Willemsen told study tour attendees. “This building [in Amsterdam] brings everything together, which is very important for us.”

The company has one privacy gate, a single sign-on, for all its titles. One big advantage to that strategy is the amount of first-party data it brings in. 

“Our big objective is working as one company,” he said. “We grew through buying all those companies, and we now really have to work as one DPG company.”

Implementing an idea from Amedia, DPG created Uit Andrere Media, which gives higher-paying subscribers access to all its Web sites. This brings in about €1 million a month in added revenue, and 25% of subscribers are using it.

Subscribers go to their usual preferred brand and are shown links to other titles. The company also sends an e-mailed newsletter to 250,000 with the best articles from all their titles.

“This didn’t bring down sales or change sales within the different titles,” Willemsen said. “People are still very committed to their own titles but now can read others.”

Paired with the single sign-on approach is an effort to keep people from sharing their accounts too broadly. The media company is downgrading a subscription from five devices to three in the near future, which will block about 210,000 non-paying accounts. 

At the other end of the password-sharing spectrum, DPG has created a focus on family content/accounts that allows subscribed adults to share their account with their children.

Roularta Media: one log-in, multiple brand focus

Leading magazine publisher Roularta Media Group has 50+ brands and one platform. The publisher replaced all its brand specific apps with one app: MijnMagazines, a place where it reaches entire families with individual brands that connect with readers. 

While having a single sign-on like DPG, Roularta differs by giving every brand a dedicated place within the app. 

“Individual Web sites drive a lot of traffic and conversion,” Nele Baeyens, marketing director of magazines and digital brand innovation at Roularta, told study tour attendees. “But we made an overarching MijnMagazine account. We can really increase personalisation and understand better the way people are reading our content.”

The company’s digital subscription strategy has four parts:

1. Single log-in.

2. Smart personalisation and consistent tagging of content (the newsroom plays a key role in this strategy).

3. Company-wide data platform.

4. Setting one objective for all teams (currently, that is 125,000 digital subscriptions by 2026).

During the first year of a user’s subscription, they are encouraged to read as much as possible, Baeyens said. 

“We have exclusive content for the app. The multi-brand is important, as is sharing with family members. We use loyalty to warm them up for personal pricing. We build reading habits in the first three months, focusing on multi-brand reading.”

Roularta research found 62.7% of respondents wanted to expand their subscriptions and 28% wanted to share their content. Like DPG, Roularta encourages a family subscription. The company does not, however, police it and has no limits on the number of devices per subscription.

“People especially like to share with their partner and with their children,” Marketing Director Margot de Wijn said. “We don’t want to restrict people in sharing their subscriptions. It’s nice for people to share.”

The company’s marketing and editorial departments are aligned with the strategy of one company yet also reflect the multi-brand approach, de Wijn said: “We believe in the power of the single brand but we also work with the broader perspective.”

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