Germany’s largest media companies have teamed up to fight the dominance of technology platforms in the market
Media Impact, the joint sales house of Axel Springer and Funke Mediengruppe, has formed an advertising alliance with the sales teams of publishing colleagues RTL Group and Gruner+Jahr to jointly sell all of its advertising space and capabilities. It was announced by Digiday.
The new partners own major news publications including Bild, Welt, Business Insider and magazines including Der Spiegel, Die Aktuelle, Stern and Geo.
All of these projects have a monthly audience of around 50 million people. By comparison, Facebook in Germany has a monthly audience of around 40 million.
The collaboration aims to actively attract investment from media agencies and direct advertisers.
“This level of cooperation would have been unthinkable in the past,” said Carsten Schweke, chairman of Media Impact. He stressed that collaboration between major publishers was the main way to get a larger share of digital advertising budgets.
He added that Google, YouTube and Facebook account for the bulk of the growing advertising revenues.
“With collaboration, we want to get our fair share back… This is the basis of our future growth: finding the right mix of reach, relevance, service and high quality advertising that we can offer advertisers and agencies,” Schweke said.