In a world of declining ad volume and revenue for print publications, the global newspaper industry is forced to become more consumer-focused, and less ad-driven. For Mediahuis Netherlands, that meant consolidating ad and editorial processes, especially for their main title, De Telegraaf. As a long-time Stibo DX customer, the company aimed to optimize the ad and editorial processes and make CUE Print its all-encompassing solution to support page planning and ad production.
Since 2015, De Telegraaf has seen more than a 50% decline in ad volume and sales. Back then, they were using three different systems for their page planning and ad production. The ad department did these processes by using their own systems. The newsrooms worked with CUE Print for planning and page design. There was a small overlap in processes regarding the ads which are mounted on the editorial pages.
“By consolidating the systems we were able to work more efficient and save hundreds of thousands of euro on software licenses and maintaining these systems.”
Marco Zwanenburg
Product Owner of Editorial Systems, Mediahuis Netherlands
It was all costing the company a lot of time and money. Marco Zwanenburg, Product Owner of Editorial Systems for Mediahuis Netherlands, says that was the main driver for consolidating to one centralized system. “By consolidating the systems we were able to work more efficient and save hundreds of thousands of euro on software licenses and maintaining these systems.”
For Mediahuis Netherlands, the decision to upgrade to more functionalities of CUE Print was a no-brainer. They phased out their ad planning and production systems and began optimizing more of CUE Print’s capabilities by 2021. Zwanenburg says the training process for employees was simple and in just a few weeks everyone was familiar with CUE Print.
“Processes are now more efficient, and we can run them with less people. All print pages are now available in CUE Print. All ad pages are now archived as well and available in our archive system,” says Zwanenburg.
De Telegraaf is one of Mediahuis Netherlands’ main publications. It is part of Mediahuis, an international Belgium media group with companies in the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and Luxembourg. Mediahuis is also a CUE Publishing customer.