MADSACK Media Group: Making regional news even more relevant with Google Cloud
About Madsack
MADSACK Media Group is a German media group based in Hanover. The group’s core business consists of journalistic products, which include the publishing platform of the editorial network Germany (RND), 19 regional daily newspapers, and the national news portal RND.de.
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Contact usMADSACK Media Group uses BigQuery for a scalable, unified data solution that delivers powerful insights with unprecedented speed.
Google Cloud results
- Unifies the data for 15 regional newspapers and other subsidiaries on one platform with BigQuery
- Accelerates insight from data analysis with Looker Studio and Looker
- Helps shape decision-making at all levels to better serve subscriber needs and preferences
Visualizes business intelligence data in seconds
The digital revolution has changed the media landscape forever. Traditional media outlets have seen their business models disrupted by smaller, nimbler companies who can respond much more quickly to the opportunities provided by the internet and social media.
Germany’s MADSACK Media Group is trying to buck that trend. The group owns 19 daily newspapers and more than 20 advertising papers, giving it a wide reach across the country. The group is also a successful producer of digital, film and television content. Its postal services transport letters and parcels reliably from businesses, institutions and private customers. And its full-service agencies and corporate publishing service providers offer customized B2C and B2B communications solutions.
The group remains steadfastly committed to investing in quality journalism at all levels, while adapting to demands of the digital revolution. So it created RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND), a subsidiary company that provides MADSACK Media Group’s regional newspapers with online content and a digital publishing platform that ensures that the group’s 2.4 million readers receive the same high standards of service whichever newspaper they subscribe to.
"From our reader’s perspectives, we deliver everything from hyper local news that only affects a few thousand people, all the way to large scale investigations across international borders," says Marcel Fehring, Team Lead Data, RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland. "We focus on subscription revenue and want our readers to have high quality journalism presented in a nice, neat package."
As a result of its digital transformation, MADSACK Media Group has been producing far more data, much of which is generated by Google Analytics. But the group soon found it was generating more data than its infrastructure and business intelligence (BI) tools could comfortably handle. When the time came to build a new data solution, the group turned to Google Cloud.
"We had scaling and performance issues with our existing data platform and an out of date BI tool, so it was time to look for something new," says Fehring. "Google Cloud gave us the opportunity to build a scalable, unified data warehouse that could serve all of our publications."
"We had scaling and performance issues with our existing data platform and an out of date BI tool, so it was time to look for something new. Google Cloud gave us the opportunity to build a scalable, unified data warehouse that could serve all of our publications."
—Marcel Fehring, Team Lead Data, RedaktionsNetzwerk DeutschlandImproving performance, accelerating insights
The core of RND’s new data warehouse solution is BigQuery. As a Google Cloud product, it can ingest data from Google Analytics, RND’s primary source of data, with ease. There are several other datastreams that RND pipelines in using third party data processing tools. For some particularly complex use cases, the company uses Cloud Functions to run its data pipeline processes.
With all the data ingested, RND can then collate, harmonize, and analyze it within BigQuery. "The speed of the processing with BigQuery is really impressive. That’s the first thing I noticed," says Fehring. "And I also really like the particular dialect of SQL that BigQuery uses. It makes interrogating the data very simple."
RND’s implementation of BigQuery and Google Cloud was such a success that it soon caught the attention of other subsidiaries within MADSACK Media Group. Gutenberg Rechenzentrum (GRZ) is the IT service provider for the wider MADSACKMedia Group. Having seen what RND was doing with Google Cloud, GRZ was curious to see if the solution would fit MADSACK Media Group’s other use cases. "RND’s focus was on digital subscribers, but there are companies within MADSACK Media Group that are also very interested in data about our print operations, especially to do with advertising," says Dominik Becker, IT Consultant and Product Owner, GRZ.
After a successful proof of concept using the same principles and tools as RND, GRZ began rolling out its new Google Cloud-based data warehouse across the wider MADSACK Media Group group. As well as BigQuery, GRZ uses Cloud Composer to orchestrate its Extract, Transform, and Load operations in its data handling.
GRZ also followed RND's lead in using Looker Studio as its primary data reporting tool, helping non-technical users to easily access the insights gained from analysis in BigQuery. MADSACK Media Group also implemented Looker for users who require more detailed information and want to run their own custom reports for enhanced business intelligence. "The most impressive thing about Looker is how much it reduces the time between running queries and gaining insight. You can visualize data that you’ve created only moments before," says Becker.
"The most impressive thing about Looker is how much it reduces the time between running queries and gaining insight. You can visualize data that you’ve created only moments before."
—Dominik Becker, IT Consultant and Product Owner, GRZAn infrastructure for change
MADSACK Media Group now has a highly scalable, unified data warehouse that can present users with powerful insights at an unprecedented speed. "By building our data warehouse with Google Cloud, we have the capability to provide more accurate, more relevant analysis and insight to the people who make decisions across the group," says Becker. "It’s helping to accelerate our digital transformation into a truly data-driven organization."
A single, stable environment means that IT staff at RND and GRZ no longer have to deal with the maintenance and operations issues of the previous analytics platform. As a digital service provider to MADSACK Media Group’s stable of newspapers, RND used to receive three to four calls a day asking for help with the data, each one of which could take between 20 minutes to a couple of hours to handle. The new solution has reduced that to one or two calls a week, and rather than complaining about operational issues, the calls are about how best to use the new tools available with Google Cloud. "The questions we’re getting now are very sophisticated compared to before," says Fehring. "This contributes greatly to our organization's transformation."
GRZ has experienced a similar phenomenon. Freed of the operational overheads of the previous platform, IT staff can focus their efforts on adding value to their internal clients with data. "There’s been a real change in what our staff are doing with their time," says Becker. "With the previous platform we spent most of our time managing infrastructure. Now, we can spend our time on more data analyses, developing new features, and adding new functionality for our customers."
The move to Google Cloud has also impacted the subscribers. With much more granular detail available, the Media Group is able to understand the preferences of subscribers much more accurately and drive them towards the kind of stories they are most interested in or might have missed. For example, one new feature that RND developed was a weekly individualized email tailored to each subscriber that points out the most popular stories that they haven’t read yet.
"By building our data warehouse with Google Cloud, we have the capability to provide more accurate, more relevant analysis and insight to the people who make decisions across the group. It’s helping to accelerate our digital transformation into a truly data-driven organization."
—Dominik Becker, IT Consultant and Product Owner, GRZHelping readers get the stories they want
MADSACK Media Group’s editorial staff can now access data on exactly how and when their stories are being consumed, and this can help them make more informed decisions about how to shape their coverage. "There are some topics that recur every year that we just didn’t know were popular," says Fehring. "For instance, we found out that readers love a story we run every year about mushroom picking in Brandenburg, and we had no idea of the impact it had before. Now we have the infrastructure to identify those previously unknown opportunities, take advantage of them and share them with our network partners."
With the data warehouse up and running, RND and GRZ are working on ways to add more value. For GRZ, this means rolling out the platform to more business units within the group. RND, meanwhile, is working to build a network of power users within the newspapers. "We want to enable our newspapers to work with data on their own, without having to go through the bottleneck of my team," says Fehring. In addition, RND recently released their latest product: OnePlatform. A platform to help news publishers drive their digital transformation. "A lot of regional newspaper companies don’t have the resources to become a digital, data-driven organization on their own. We can help them," he says. "The infrastructure that we have now with Google Cloud gives us the foundation to achieve this."
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Contact us
About Madsack
MADSACK Media Group is a German media group based in Hanover. The group’s core business consists of journalistic products, which include the publishing platform of the editorial network Germany (RND), 19 regional daily newspapers, and the national news portal RND.de.