Publishers Need a Mindset Shift: In conversation with Ringier’s CDO

Hi, Sandro. We’re very happy that you could join us today. Can you briefly introduce yourself?  

Hi, I’m Sandro, the Chief Digital Officer at Ringier Media Switzerland. Ringier has 6,600 employees across 140 companies in over 20 countries. I’m also co-leading Blick, which is the biggest media in our portfolio.  

Why did you join the AI Study Tour?  

Ringier is always trying to be the frontrunners in technology. We were early digital transformation adopters, and the same can be said of AI.

It was logical when we saw the program WAN-IFRA was able to put together to go to San Francisco and speak directly to the AI players instead of trying to interact with a member of their sales team.  

What are your key takeaways from the AI Study Tour?

I’ll summarize it in three points: 

In every session, I remember you bringing up the fact that we’re not just here to reduce costs; we’re here to try to grow the pie. Do you have any concrete ideas on how to use AI for revenue growth?   

I don’t have the billion-dollar idea yet, but my mindset changed a lot after this tour with the conviction that we need to take it into our own hands. 

One big “aha” moment for me when I started to dive deeper was that the big AI players are stuffed with money, but they never had to think about how to make money because the money is just there. The result is that they all go in this race to build technology, but they don’t yet have a clear business case for it. 

It is up to us to think about business cases. We need to start now because they will not do the work and build a business case for publishers. They do not care about us, and once they realize that the media is important, it could be too late. 

You said you did not have the impression that the big AI players really care about news publishing. Can you expand?  

I think the OpenAIs and Perplexities have a similar mindset to Google back in the day. They have no problem crawling, scraping, and pirating whatever is out on the Internet. They don’t really care that it took money and effort to create the data – the news – that they’re crawling.  

This changed my perspective on our relations with them because whatever they offer right now, it’s a piece of nothing. They’re offering us a revenue share out of nothing because they don’t have to make money. Why? Because they’re stuffed with millions of dollars from their investors. It is up to us, then, to use their technology, not their business models. 

There are a couple of startups, like Tollbit or ScalePost, that are trying to create new revenue-generation value propositions for publishers. What do you think of this?  

I appreciate all the initiatives that they’re taking. I think it’s important. I, on the other hand, am not going to wait till somebody else finds a solution for us as a company or an industry. It’s our responsibility to take our own destiny into our own hands.  

I think ProRata, for example, is a good start, and the idea is the right one. But this will only work if you put everybody behind you to go then to the big players. We have to rally as one, as an industry, to cut them off from freely scraping our content. Then, they’re going to have a big problem because they’ll not have the news data that everybody’s looking for. But history has shown us that, as an industry, it is not easy to get many groups behind one goal.   

You introduced a Chatbot for your Blick newspaper. Can you briefly explain your journey of creating it?  

We saw that ChatGPT and Perplexity were growing fast, so there was obviously an open-minded society out there that was willing to use chatbots. We decided to try to adapt the behavior and bring it to our own website, hence the chatbot.  

Our chatbot relies on strict editorial rules instead of Google and ChatGPT and uses our own content. We are sure about the content. It’s reliable, it’s trustworthy. It’s like talking to the newsroom, but you can interact with it.  

We partnered with Google, and we thought it was going take us a few months, but it took way longer. We went live two weeks ago with a soft launch, and we’re really happy with what we’re seeing.  

To round things off, to me, AI feels very much like what it was like with the Internet in 1999. You disagree. Tell me more.  

I started thinking of AI like the Internet in 1997. If we could go back to 1997 with what we know today about the Internet, we would jump on it. We would try it. We would go for it. We would try test cases. We will build business cases. We would embrace it.  

What we know today is: AI will change everything and it will not go away. If you see this as a fact, then all you can do is get that mindset, not make the mistake again of waiting till it goes away or somebody tells you what to do.