RTL Deutschland Transformed: From Content Champion to Content, Tech, & Data Powerhouse

The future has long since begun! The media industry is becoming increasingly data-driven due to its complexity. Consequently, a strong combination of data, analytics, and media expertise is needed to maintain the pole position in the competition. RTL Deutschland, part of the Bertelsmann Group, now finds itself on the ever-important journey to becoming the technology leading media business. For Europe's largest cross-media company, which reaches around 99 per cent of the German population with its media brands, data plays a valuable and crucial role. That's why RTL Deutschland was one of the first German media companies to set up its own data unit, RTL Data. The largest in Germany to date, it is also anchored in top management. Led by Chief Data & Analytics Officer Karin Immenroth, the current team of approximately 300 international data specialists will continue shaping and driving RTL Deutschland's transformation – with innovative data solutions and structures.

Paradigm Shift: Innovative Development Teams According to Data Mesh Logic

The challenge has also begun – and RTL Data has responded. It was only in January, 2022 that RTL Deutschland, with its strong channels and brands such as RTL, VOX and ntv, and the publishing house Gruner + Jahr, which stands for excellent print brands such as stern, GEO and Capital, came together to form Europe's leading news and entertainment company across all genres. The shared content generates billions of data points that RTL Data juggles, models and analyses on a daily basis. A big opportunity requiring big changes. "Today, we are no longer a classic central data team, but rather work according to data mesh logic, which makes us an important interface for all areas and departments at RTL Deutschland and Gruner + Jahr," says Karin Immenroth. Her department has long since bundled and managed the entire strategy and expertise surrounding data, research, and data technologies, working closely with all business units in the process. Her recipe for success? "I believe very strongly in mixed teams in which experts from different disciplines are represented. The teams have to work in an integrated way," explains Immenroth. For example, data scientists work closely with domain specialists from each of the individual areas. The goal: to provide insights and data-supported decision-making aids to all departments – for process optimisation, individualisation and transparency of the effectiveness of their own powerful media brands. "We have become 'change managers' ourselves, so to speak," says Immenroth, summarising the dynamics.

In order to meet the complex and rapidly growing requirements, Immenroth has increased her search for data engineers and data scientists: "We simply haven't trained enough of these specialists in Germany over the last five to ten years.  RTL Data is therefore now recruiting internationally and integrating experts from other European countries as well as Asia into diverse projects.

Smart Data, not Big Data

The challenges are complex: "We're faced with an increasingly fragmented media landscape in which the range of channels and amount of content offered is exploding and people's attention spans are rapidly decreasing. We have to take this into consideration and need a broader view," says Immenroth. Today, RTL Deutschland and Gruner + Jahr alone offer 15 TV channels, 50 print brands, 17 radio stations, one podcast platform and 75 additional digital offerings. Among them is the streaming service RTL+. Immenroth: "As a media provider, our goal is to better understand and serve the needs and expectations of our customers. And by customers I mean our viewers, readers, listeners, users and also our advertisers. We want to tailor what we offer to the needs of our users and offer our market partners innovative products and show them how we can use data to increase the impact of campaigns even further. The motto here is: not big, but rather smart data!

Researching Advertising Effectiveness Using AI-Based In-House Developments

Data plays an increasingly important role in monetizing what's offered. RTL Data is therefore developing products for marketing that provide data-driven decision-making aids, for example, in customer advisory services. One such product was presented to the public last year: BrandAId. "We brought together AI-based data from Nielsen and YouGov and built an algorithm engine that helps us measure advertising impact across media," explains Immenroth. For more than 1,300 German brands in 40 sectors, advertising volume and sales development were recorded over four years and the necessary KPIs were collected from consumers. "When a client books an advertising package with us, we can determine how well we performed with our marketer, the Ad Alliance, versus how well the other media performed." In the future, the tool will also be used for forecasting and simulating advertising impact. An essential element for advertising impact is also creation, for which SignatureCode tool was already discussed in 2020. Here, patterns that have a leverage effect on the success of an advertising spot are traced – naturally with the support of artificial intelligence. A team of 50 to 60 people is currently working on marketing solutions alone. The goal: "We don't want to sell just advertising, we want to sell impact," says Immenroth.

A New Dimension: Competitive Advantages through Hyper-Personalisation

Despite its large reach, television is no longer television. Through digitalisation, TV channels have diversified. They have become media brands serving all needs simultaneously: They broadcast television, online content and podcasts, as well as radio stations and streaming services. With RTL+, RTL Deutschland already has an attractive data-driven streaming offer – and RTL Data provides the data-driven recommendation systems to go with it. "On our platforms, for example, we are working on hyper–personalisation, where every user receives the right content at the right time and in the right format," says Immenroth.

To understand user behaviour, while maintaining privacy, RTL Data generates large amounts of metadata to improve computational understanding of content. This can be text, video and audio analysis of our content elements to computationally understand what the piece of content is about. Alongside this, natural language processing is used to recognise entities and extract relationships to computationally understand content in terms of subject-verb-object relationships. All this information is stored in a gigantic knowledge graph, a semantic network that captures a cross-media understanding of content. Combined with information about how that content is being used, recommendation systems that really get to the heart of the user's interest can be created. "This is a whole new level of data-driven recommendations that allows us to hyper-personalise based on understanding content and usage and therefor increase and maintain the user's interest in our content" says Immenroth. "The use of this kind of technology, combined with the expertise of our editorial curators, is another milestone in tailoring mainstream media to individual interests."

Everyone in the House Should Deal with Data and Profit from it

A media group, of course, doesn't only sell advertising. It primarily produces editorial content for its audience. Long gone are the days when the Media Research" department were the only ones to print out and distribute data. That's why the RTL Data team is currently developing a complex reportingcentre that will enable anyone and everyone to obtain a wide variety of analyses quickly and easily. Immenroth: "It sounds simple, but it's a really big project". RTL now has 7,500 employees, and Hamburg, i.e. the publishing house Gruner + Jahr, also must be taken into account. This means that RTL also now has a great deal of competence in all print media. "We not only collect the data, we're also able to offer our colleagues advice when and where they need it," says Immenroth.

Boosting Success with Strategic Alliances

To drive RTL Deutschland's transformation into Europe's leading data and tech company, Karin Immenroth and her team are not only developing a group-wide data strategy and identifying new and innovative data solutions, but also ensuring transparency through data governance and building new partnerships with companies and associations. "Our goal is to generate targeted, competitive advantages through data and to further expand our strong market position as RTL Deutschland."

One particularly important alliance is the European netID Foundation, which was founded in 2018 by RTL Deutschland, ProSiebenSat.1 and United Internet Media to create a cross-market solution for the DGPR (General Data Protection Regulation). On the one hand, this solution enables users to manage their consent and personal data easily and transparently, and on the other hand, it allows participating companies to use the data in a manner compliant with data-protection policies – also and especially in the cookie-free future.

Furthermore, RTL Data is also an official partner of the AI Bundesverband and actively supports the general development in the AI market, also on a political level, e.g. LEAM (Large European AI Models – an initiative that promotes the development of large AI models).

In addition, the parent company Bertelsmann has founded a new subsidiary, Bertelsmann Data Services (BeData) 2021. The goal of BeData is to enable the exchange of data between all Bertelsmann units on a national and international level. "This may sound simple, but the framework behind this idea is very complex, both legally and financially. This type of data exchange platform creates enormous synergies within Bertelsmann in the area of customer insights," emphasises Immenroth.

Networked thinking and working: The joint success is already proving those involved at RTL Deutschland right: the content offered in the first half of 2022 was inpsiring: together, the RTL Deutschland family of channels (RTL, VOX, ntv, NITRO, SUPER RTL, RTLZWEI, RTLup and VOXup, as well as the Pay-TV channels RTL Crime, RTL Living, RTL Passion and GEO Television) achieved a market share of 27.3 per cent in the core target group of 14- to 59-year-olds. Already in the first quarter, RTL, ntv, stern, and Capital's online offering achieved 16.48 million visits and the print media stern and Capital recorded 8.99 million readers per month. The streaming offer RTL+ can also look forward to continuous growth figures. Currently, the number of subscribers is 3.2 million.

Karin Immenroth: "We have everything it takes to continue defining the future of media companies and driving the transformation of RTL Deutschland into a content, tech and data powerhouse." She has the management's full support and has long been part of the media company's extended management team with a permanent seat at the table of decision-makers and enablers.