It’s official: The BCN Brand Community Network will start the 2024 marketing year on 1 September as a joint venture. The shareholders involved are Hubert Burda Media, Funke and the KLAMBT Media Group, whose portfolio BCN has been marketing since 2020 as part of a strategic partnership.
The Bundeskartellamt, Germany’s antitrust authority, approved the merger back in March, and since then it has been full steam ahead with the preparations for the launch on the advertising market. The contracts to found the joint venture were signed on Friday, 4 August, in Munich, Germany.
The joint venture will be led by Tobias Conrad, who has been the sole Managing Director of BCN since February 2023. It will offer its advertising customers a vast range of extremely high-reach product and services. Thanks to the more than 300 media brands in the three partner publishers’ portfolios, the BCN now has a reach that encompasses around 63 million people – and 89 per cent of people in Germany aged 14 and over – in print, digital, video, audio and out of home.
This is something we have been working towards for years, as forming a strong alliance is the only way us publishers can hold our own in an advertising market that is now dominated by a handful of global technology groups. This truly historic moment will give the three partners involved the strength to face the challenges that the dynamically changing media markets have to throw at us on a more stable economic foundation.
Our ‘new BCN’ combines the expertise, technology, resources and innovation of the marketing experts at three major publishers and offers our advertising clients a marketing team with an extraordinarily diverse and wide-reaching portfolio. We are delighted that we can now really kick on together.
BCN has been doing an excellent job in marketing the KLAMBT Media Group’s titles for over two and a half years now. In addition to the high-reach digital portals and magazines, BCN will also take over the marketing of Delius Klasing’s high-quality multimedia in the branded goods industry from September. The joint venture that has now been agreed combines the expertise of three innovative media groups and confirms their strategic orientation to establish and expand long-term partnerships with advertisers and their agencies.