Case Study: DER SPIEGEL improves user-needs strategy with Smartocto

DER SPIEGEL boosts user-needs strategy with Smartocto as 80% of paywall content is context-driven

The German news organization DER SPIEGEL, a top journalistic brand in Europe, sought to optimize its content strategy and suspected it could benefit from a more user needs-centric approach. They partnered with vendor Smartocto, utilizing its User Needs Tagger and analysis services during a Proof of Concept to gain data-driven insights into their audience's preferences.

Smartocto analyzed DER SPIEGEL's paywalled content and created a baseline report using its automatic tagging. The solution revealed an overproduction of context-driven articles and a significant audience appetite for action and emotion-driven content. This data-informed strategy empowered DER SPIEGEL to better align its output with user needs, leading to the development of a new format, Spiegel Extra, specifically designed to serve those needs and help grow audience relevance.

DER SPIEGEL