Politiken’s Troels Behrendt Jørgensen in conversation

Overall, what have been the growth and encouragement areas for your media company in 2024?

Like most players in the Danish market, we’ve been marked by the slowdown that has characterized media markets since the end of the Covid-19 period and the reopening of our society. Generally, the Nordic region is known for a high willingness to pay for media, but even here we’re seeing a more restrained interest in digital subscriptions compared to before. However, it’s encouraging for us that we remain a fundamentally sound business with satisfied advertisers and subscribers.

What percentage of your revenue comes from advertising, subs, other revenue?

Politiken has been on a journey for many years towards greater content sales and less dependence on advertising. A very rough overview of our business would show a content sales business of around 80% and an advertising business of around 20%.

Is AI having a major impact on your business? In what ways?

We have spent considerable time and resources building industry-leading technologies and internal tools that we have high expectations for. These technologies occupy significant space in our strategies and thoughts about product development, but we have yet to reach what I would call actual business development that creates new revenue streams and entirely new digital products based on these technologies. I believe this is something we have in common with most media companies, and this is essentially where these technologies will face their real test. I feel we’re still waiting to see examples of this in the industry, but they’ll likely come.

How is your relationship with the big tech platforms?

Like everyone else’s: Strained, but still characterized by a different regulatory environment here in Denmark compared to other countries. We’ve united as publishers in the organization DPCMO (Danish Press Publications Collective Management Organisation), which helps Danish news media get paid for their work. The association, operating under a mandate from the Danish Ministry of Culture, ensures that large tech companies like Google and Facebook pay for using news from Danish media.

Are subscriptions the panacea for future reader involvement/monetization? In what way does advertising support your subscriptions drive?

I find it very difficult to imagine a world where the subscription is not precisely what drives our business towards greater reader involvement and, in the longer term, digital sustainability for the entire business. Advertisements play a role, but the vast majority of our future business will and must lie in selling digital subscriptions. So you could indeed call it a universal remedy.

Brand building. What are the key elements of building a strong brand in today's market?

Generally, Politiken’s brand stands strong in our target group, and our name is associated with the right values and quality. We’re incredibly happy and grateful for that, but simultaneously, it’s a challenge for older and established brands like ours to maintain and develop the value of our name. One factor that plays into this is that we no longer have the advantage of being physically present in as many homes as in the old days. Such physical presence was a good and stable reminder of our existence in Danes’ consciousness 10 years ago.

With algorithm changes on social media in recent years, the value of these platforms for brand building seems somewhat devaluated, so in the future, we’ll need to spend more money on marketing ourselves than we’ve been accustomed to. And our approach to the audience must be more curious and inviting than it has been previously.

What differences do you see in media consumption across various areas/regions you operate in?

Throughout most of the Nordic region, media is under pressure in advertising markets – this is true in Denmark as well, but not quite as severely as we’ve seen in Norway and Sweden, where significant drops between 24% and 30% have hit annual print advertising revenues (Source: IRM Media). During the same period, the Danish market has collectively lost 18%, which is still serious, even though our losses at Politiken are not quite as large. As advertising media in the Danish market, we have historically not held the same dominant position that we see media in our two northern neighboring countries enjoying, so their losses are relatively much greater.

Politiken has traditionally been a media outlet for urban readers with high education and high household income, and therefore most of our advertisers have messages they specifically want to reach this target group. This is clearly a strength for us, and we realize higher prices in the market than our competitors because we are so laser-focused on precisely who we’re addressing. But this also means that Politiken does not have dominant brand and media presence in large parts of Denmark outside the major cities and in other segments.

What is your overall view of the state of the advertising market? How are you adapting to any decline?

As in most countries, we’re experiencing money flowing towards tech giants and performance marketing. This forces us to accelerate our digital transformation in the advertising department even faster and more targeted, and fortunately, we've already made good progress. We’re product developing through digital transformation, and we're seeing a larger share of our revenue coming from native advertising, video, audio, social media, and out-of-home categories – which are growth categories – but of course, banners as well.

Our print advertising revenue is still high, and the task we face is to maintain print revenue for as long as possible while simultaneously prioritising new sales methods and products.

For Politiken, programmatic ad sales are not the way forward. We sell directly to advertisers with a promise of transparency and 100% viewability on all booked banners. Since Politiken closed programmatic banner sales in 2021, our average CPM has more than doubled. The advantages of saying goodbye to the technological complexity of the programmatic world have only grown with increasing focus on privacy from authorities and customers.

Sales teams. Do you see a future where new structures, new approaches and new skill sets are required?

New skills are absolutely needed. Instead of administering technology, we must be specialists and skilled advisors who can lift revenue per advertiser by selling campaigns across platforms. That’s why sales to small and medium-sized businesses are outsourced, so we have more time to focus on large customers. We believe in sales that increasingly rely on data and are proactive towards new business areas and partnerships. For example, we’ve ventured into international sales, which we have high expectations for.

Where does print fit into your advertising portfolio?

We still sell print with pride, and it remains part of our portfolio alongside all other products, but we prefer to sell it in packages where advertisers get even broader reach through other platforms. We’re satisfied with this direct sales approach, but like others, we experience print has somewhat vanished from media planners’ consciousness. The paradox is that it hasn’t disappeared from readers’ perspectives at all: Our 470,000 weekly print product readers still have a very close relationship with us.

We haven’t yet found the answer to changing print product perceptions among planners. But without falling into excessive optimism about print, the rumors about the paper format’s death are still out of sync with reality.

Events. What do you do in this space? Exclusive events for subscribers perhaps? How do you create them? A specialized/dedicated team to run them?

Politiken has for many years focused on large live events, which we either are part of or organize ourselves. Our skilled live editorial team has, for example, in 2024 arranged a major stage with debates, music, and presentations at the so-called Folkemøde, which is a kind of democracy festival held annually in Denmark. We also have our own Politiken Festival, where we gather our readers for talks, music, and entertainment throughout an entire Saturday. Live events are complicated things to manage, but inevitable in terms of managing our brand in the future, which should actually behave more invitingly and curiously than we have managed to in the past.

Are podcasts in your wheelhouse? Successful? Resource heavy? How do you monetize?

We believe very strongly in audio and podcasts and have allocated many resources, technology, and employees to this over the past 10 years. It increasingly resembles a subscription advantage that we can live off, as audio is retentive and engaging. It is, of course, extremely satisfactory that we can see a subscription perspective with audio-production, but this puts advertising sales at a disadvantage, as we thereby keep large parts of our editorial production exclusive to subscribers. However, we are also becoming increasingly successful at capitalising on our production through more podcast advertisements and native podcasts open to anyone.

What about future advertising trends?

Video continues to grow. The same goes for social media, influencers, podcasts, and addressable TV. We also continue to see positive development in native advertising, though this isn’t true for everyone in the market. We still have many desktop users, but more and more is being processed on mobile. AI will be able to be used to optimize, for example, our native production in the same way it contributes to the editorial work.

Future of Media overall. How do you envision the media landscape evolving over the next decade? What role will traditional media play in this future?

We’ll need to consolidate through collaboration across old boundaries and national borders. Today’s old competitor is tomorrow’s partner. We’ll collaborate on much more than bundling, which we’ve already wholeheartedly entered into with The New York Times. Above all, there should be much more collaboration on technology development.

Challenges and Opportunities. What are the biggest challenges facing media companies today? Where do you see the most significant opportunities for growth?

As mentioned, we believe in audio, which we’ve made extensive plans for in the coming years. But the challenge with audio, as well as text and all other media content, is that we must expect the battle for attention to become absurdly intense with all the AI-generated content already flooding digital media users. Who will manage to get anyone’s ear to present anything in the future media market?

As we look towards/into 2025, can you offer any comfort or words of wisdom to those media companies who have seen ad revenue losses this year?

I doubt it will be perceived as comfort, but there are no other paths than finding a role that creates value for readers, so they are willing to pay for at least part of the content.

The large advertising budgets are still within reach for us in the future if tech giants' behaviour is regulated. One can speculate about how to work towards that in the market one operates in.

More about Mark Challinor: Mark is a commercial and media advertising strategist. He recently led the International News Media Association’s (INMA.org) Advertising Initiative (the news industry’s deeper dive into media advertising). He has also been European and global president of INMA. He produces a monthly Future of Media Advertising newsletter on Linkedin, as well as running an advertising committee made up of senior executives from across the world’s media. Mark is now CEO of News Media UK Consulting. Follow Mark on X: @challinor and LinkedIn.

Last week he spoke to Mediahuis CEO Gert Ysebaert. We'll be back in 2025 with some top interviews.