speaker: Benjamin Kolb und Azir Razzak

topic: 14 Websites in 12 Monaten: Wie die Migration zu einer Multi-Brand- & Multi-Channel-Plattform in Rekordzeit gelingt

What was the initial challenge Azir.

So to begin with, first of all, hi everyone. so to begin with, what we had is we had a divestment, so immediate media, was the original home for all of our platforms, and we were moving to a new business called our Media, and what we needed to do there is ensure that we could move everything in an efficient way, but also in a way that was fit for the future.

because the media landscape was evolving, evolving fast, and we wanted to make sure that we were ahead of the game or at the front of the curve.

So what we found were was 14 brands built on an in-house self-developed platform and as you can imagine, no documentation. We had to let ask a lot of people on what the requirements were a lot of deprecated stuff in there. So this was the scene that we met.

And looking to a solution for this. There's many partners out there. There's many options. What we wanted to do is make sure that as a business we could work with somebody where our technology was looked after, we would work with somebody who's best in class and we found a partner in purple where we felt there was capability, but also the vision of what purple was offering, was looking at today's problems, but also anticipating the problems of

the future

Additionally

For us, it is very important to find a partner that we could work with. They needed to be

they needed to understand the technology, but we also need to make sure that we could collaborate and build that long term relationship with them because that for us is essential to make sure that we're always talking, we can have good dialogue with them, we can work through challenges.

especially as Benny's mentioned, the platform that we're moving, moving from was undocumented, there was going to be a lot of wrinkles, a lot of gremlins in there, and we wanted to make sure that we had a partner that would help us through that transition.

So this definitely was an ambitious project. The requirements though, not very, because there were only 21 is the functionality should stay as is, whatever that means. And the second requirement was that the migration had to be done in 12 months because then you needed to move away from the platform. So there was no debating the time.

line.

So when we embarked on this project, a lot of colleagues.

We're commenting, how are you going to achieve this in such a short space of time.

The previous migration which was still in progress to an in-house platform called Fabric that was built by Immediate Media was in elements still in progress and it had taken a long time.

So when we said we would do this in 12 months, a lot of people were slightly shocked, the proof is in the pudding, we delivered it and we achieved the 12 month target and we migrated all of our brands successfully within time frame, and that's thanks to purple and also clear laser focus on what we wanted to achieve.

So basically how we mastered this migration is that we, so the migration was about the content management system, the editorial system, all the processes, all the content, of course, all the features, but also the brand websites, all front-end features, all integrations, third parties, affiliate links at stack, everything. So, what we did is we built one master template, so we, basically, got all the features from

that existing platform built into one template that we can roll out to all the 14 brands with one click and that's actually a strength of our platform that we do multi-brand, in a way that you can really maintain the base of all brands in one single master and have feature flags and of course the unique design of the brand and of course the content separate, but everything else is built into one code base with all the features included.

And what the time scale was looking like 12 months. Sounds like a lot of time. but you need at least to reserve 6 months for the rollout itself because then you're doing one brand every 2 weeks, and as these brands were incredibly strong in the market. We had to make sure that we do the roll out in a way that it's really safe and tested and everything. So 6 months at the end reserved for the rollout, so we had 6 months actually to implement.

The master template on our purple platform and then per brand every 2 weeks, adoption of that brand design.

Then features like adjustments or what is kind of the offering for the editorial people and the offering for the brand website, adjusting all the feature flags, content import, very important. It was very hard to get the content out of the existing platform into our platform and then test and go live, which was a pretty, pretty tough timeline.

So where are we now?

So post migration, we've got all of our brands and all of our brand teams using the purple platform, in terms of web traffic, we've, we're achieving our targets in places there have been a number of challenges. Some of our migrations were a smack bang in the middle of Google algorithm updates, especially around reviews and that kind of thing. So there was a massive hit on our traffic during migration, and it took a while.

To understand what that was, whether it was migration related or not, but we were quite sure that it was not related to migration.

but our traffic is improving, we're featuring on things like Google Discover, and our content is doing well, our teams can focus on our content, whilst we can, the tech team and purple work on the back end and the systems.

And also in terms of some figures.

We believe we saved at least one year in time, um.

And the 100,000 pounds cost saving is just an estimate. It's a finger in the air, but definitely we saved a significant amount of money we've simplified our platform where needed. It didn't need to be as complicated as it was. And also we feel that in terms of support and maintenance, our ongoing costs are lower. We're on a platform who and purple have to maintain that platform across many publishers, not just one, so an in-house team.

verses and a partner approach works for us and really the icing on the cake for us is our ability to be able to focus on our content and focus on growth and profitability and making sure that our content is what people want to read.

And now, since we migrated all the brands on our platform, which was the pain part now starts the fun part, which is great. So, there are two main projects, running at the moment. One is the digital first strategy. So basically moving away from a very inde design-based print workflow and a completely separate digital newsroom, to a

A system where we

Where the editorial team starts and the purple hub for all the brands, publishers to their website, their app, their social media channels all through the purple system and we connect a print management system to basically publish all the best articles into the into the print magazine and also use that as an input for an e-pay solution, which is also part of the purple.

platform, which all media brands are on either with an e-paper or with a more modern digital edition. so now we can round up all the all the workflows and switch the whole company to digital first, workflow. And the second big project is that we currently we have the brand websites which are news focused, and we have the apps which are more the print replica or the digital edition apps, and we want to

Get that together into one hybrid product on app and web, which is, which includes the news parts and the digital editions. so we get other benefits from that, that means one time men attendance for all the products because it's one system actually, you can cross sell, you have a much higher apps stickiness because you're publishing also the news to the app, so the usages, the usage rates rate is much higher.

And of course, there are some decent opportunities to, to unify the subscriber base, cross sell and have one single digital product on app and web and as app is also increasingly more important, for, for the brands, that would be a very, very beneficial project for, for our media, definitely.

Yeah, that's it. If you have any questions, we're over there most of the time.

Thanks.

Thank you