Ouest France | Innovate Local

David Moizan, Director of Marketing

March 12, 2025 Case no. 23

Advertising

How Ouest France's self service platform for local events drives revenue and engagement

The French media group behind Ouest France have built a clever self service and distribution platform for private people, associations and companies. The platform allows locals to communicate and market events across a spectrum of categories such as entertainment, sports, church services, evening courses etc. The events can be published in several formats in newspapers as well as on news media web sites and in apps. In this webinar we’ll learn how this low cost system allows Quest France to monetize its local audience while providing a great service for the community.

Presented by David Moizan, Director of Marketing at Groupe SIPA Ouest France in France

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By Niklas Jonason

Article Summary

Ouest France, a leading French media group, has developed a self-service platform called “Infolocale” that allows local sources to share information about upcoming events with local media, enabling publishers to leverage it in various ways. This innovative system allows associations, municipalities and companies to communicate and market events across a spectrum of categories, including entertainment, sports, church services, and evening courses. The events can be published in several formats in newspapers, news media websites and apps.

The platform has proven to be a valuable tool for cost savings and content enrichment. By shifting from manual entry of information to collecting shared content from local sources, Ouest France saves an estimated 1.8 to 2 million euros per year. The platform not only enriches newspapers and digital platforms but also fosters stronger community engagement by providing a valuable service for locals.

Background of Groupe SIPA Ouest-France

Group SIPA Ouest-France is a major French media group, primarily known as the owner of the newspaper Ouest-France, the most widely read French-language daily newspaper. Its headquarters are located in Rennes in northwestern France and its core activity encompasses five daily and nearly a hundred weekly newspapers, digital platforms, radio stations, and magazines. It is owned by the "Association pour le soutien des principes de la démocratie humaniste". The abbreviation “SIPA” in the company name stands for “société d'investissements et de participations” or, in English, “investment and holding company”. Ouest France ranks among the top three digital media outlets in France, with Actu.fr and 20 Minutes (co-owned with the Belgian group Rossel) also holding significant positions. The group has 4,200 employees, including 1,200 journalists, and collaborates with 4,000 local press correspondents.

About the Speaker

David Moizan is the Head of Marketing for Technological Solutions at Groupe SIPA Ouest-France. With a background in advertising sales agencies for national and local media, Moizan has also ventured into intrapreneurship and B2C tech solutions. He is now responsible for marketing and sales of a suite of tools for publishers, developed and tested within the Ouest-France Group.

Ouest France Technological Solutions

Infolocal is part of the suite of technological solutions that are now available as SAAS-services (Software As A Service) for other publishers in France, Europe and the rest of the world. The suite was developed by Groupe SIPA Ouest-France and has been extensively tested and validated. The goal is to provide publishers with relevant tools that have been tested and validated by our own newsrooms, marketing departments, and advertising teams.

Next to Infolocal the solutions include:

Mediego: A newsletter tool to boost audience engagement .
Storm: A CMS to create, manage, and curate editorial content and live streams.
Infoconnect: A single sign-on system for user account creation and authentication.
Infolocal is described here (in french that can be translated by your browser)) and on this marketing page (also in french).

The presentation
(edited for length and clarity)

From Content Focus to Advertising Platform

Ouest-France's journey with Infolocal began in 2006 with a focus on content. David jokes that this was happening at about the same time as his competitor Mark Zuckerberg was launching Facebook. The initial objective, for Ouest France, was to generate cost savings and create a comprehensive inventory of local events. The challenge was the high cost and time-consuming nature of manually processing heterogeneous information received from various sources. To address this, Ouest France shifted to a model of collecting shared content directly from local sources, empowering these sources to input content themselves through self service. Over time, Infolocal has evolved into a powerful content creation and advertising platform, generating revenue and driving engagement.

Enriched and Diversified Content

Infolocal has progressively broadened the variety and quality of input content. Initially focused on events, the platform now includes activities, articles, and entities:

Local Events Calendar: This feature allows users to announce concerts, shows, local festivals, conferences, charity events, and other meetings.

Leisure Activities: Users can share information about courses, cultural activities, painting, drawing, sewing, sports, and weekly meetups. For example, a hiking association can post its Sunday outings. Also things that you can enjoy all year round, such as language or cultural activities or weekly meetups.

Articles: Associations can publish event reports, member profiles, and explanations of initiatives. This feature offers more freedom of expression allowing for longer texts and the inclusion of videos, photos, and hyperlinks. Articles, which is probably the most “touchy” content currently, we are allowing associations to write what can be called, “an article”. This is not a classified. It can be an event report, the presentation of a member, the explanation of the launch of an initiative, etc. It brings more freedom to express details. The text can be long. The association can load video, photos and hyperlinks..

Entities: This function allows for sharing details about local organisations. It can be used by editors and be considered as exploitable content. We can, for example, give editors a list of specific types of entities such as sport associations, environmental associations, or a type of professional too, like restaurant, hostel. We've got location, opening hours, service provided, contact information, and it can be exploited to make articles, inventories, etc.

The four contents above can then be distributed to media that use it in several different formats. Please check the enclosed PDF for views of input and more output formats.

Distribution and Monetization

The content shared on Infolocal is distributed across various media, including newspapers, websites, digital platforms, and apps. This widespread distribution helps to monetize local audiences while providing a valuable service to the community.

David tells us that they also share content with municipalities and tourist offices. Eighty percent of municipalities of Brittany are sharing content to local media thanks to Infolocale. More than 120 of them are using Infolocale as a main source for their own agenda.

Infolocal offers combinatorial approaches—geographical, thematic, and semantic—to distribute content streams effectively. Multiple combined filters enable users to leverage content by categories, type of organization, topics, and localization. You can choose categories, the type of organisation you want to use as sources. You can choose a topic, location, age, date range, or the belonging to certain sport federations.So, for example, you can decide what type of events and the price you want to share with your audience. For example, I want the free events of this weekend in this area. Or, for example, on Wednesday, I want activities for children.

For example, even if your village has 1000 inhabitants, the widget can be set up and there's always content. Even if the content is not directly linked to the locality, it will enlarge the scope so that it will bring events in the region around the village. You can enlarge the area covered by 10 kilometers, 20 kilometers, 30 kilometers etc.

Everything is parameterable, customized or customizable so that you might feel your local pages. You can also feed your topic pages with content from Infolocale, such as topics as cycling and rugby, or dance, cinema, theater or painting.

The platform also utilizes widgets embedded in local and topic pages to enhance content visibility and user engagement. The platform also lets users create print ads as can be seen below. Ouest-France has used Infolocale to provide content for newsletters, PDFs, thematic supplements such as summer guides or flea markets.

Recently we started to distribute weekly articles with event programs with the help of AI through using our own secured AI-powered tool using different AI models and AI engines.

To sum up the collection and the distribution of content, publishers can share any events, any activities, articles or given information about organisations. They can connect digital services with other providers. If they've got a ticketing account with a third player they can use that too.

Concerning the split between journalistic content and content from Infolocale some visual tricks have been implemented. The editorial team wants the content generated by the sources to be clearly identifiable. This is done through graying out content from Infolocale, and having the Infolocale logo appearing on the photos provided through the self service.

Key results

So what has Ouest-France group achieved so far with the Infolocale platform:

More than 60 000 users each year…
….Including 45 000 associations and also professionals and municipalities.
Almost 400 000 content elements collected each year. In addition to self service we aggregate different databases. Our system is agnostic, so to speak.
Infolocale started with non-profit entities. During the first wave of COVID we opened Infolocale to advertisers for free so that they might inform our readers (print & digital) : opening hours, services provided
At the end of 2020, more than 7,000 professionals had registered. Among them, more than 70% are active. That means they actively share event content. Four years later, in february2024, we decided to launch a Proof of Concept, by reopening Infolocale for advertisers.

Key Challenges

Ouest France faced internal and external challenges in implementing and scaling Infolocal.

Internal Challenges:

Newsroom Adoption: Integrating user-generated content alongside editorial content required a cultural shift within newsrooms and among local press correspondents. Newsrooms had to find creative ways to use content they did not produce, treating user-generated content as material from an ultra-local press agency.
Advertising Sales: Agencies: Introducing a self-service advertising solution was initially challenging due to concerns about cannibalization of sales-led transactions. Advertising sales agencies needed to view self-service as an opportunity to reach the long tail of small professionals rather than a threat.

External Challenges:

Recruiting Local Organizations: Encouraging small businesses to manage their content creation independently and motivating users to create more engaging content were significant hurdles.
Demonstrating Value: Providing evidence through statistics was crucial to convince organizations to pay for the service.

Overcoming Challenges

Ouest France addressed these challenges through various strategies:

Internal Communication and Training: Working closely with newsrooms and advertising sales agencies to demonstrate the value and opportunities presented by InfoLocal.
Simplifying the Platform: Making the platform user-friendly to encourage content creation by local organizations.
Providing Support and Resources: Offering assistance and resources to help users create high-quality content.
Data and Analytics: Sharing statistics and success stories to highlight the benefits of using InfoLocal.

And concerning the ad sales, the goal is to highlight the return on investment of the long tail of small professionals versus the risk of cannibalisation. And so to prove it, David told us that they have crossed-checked the databases, the one of ad sales and the one of Infolocal. The result is that only 0.2% of the organisations in the ad sales database are among the active users of Infolocale. And in addition, we are now using the larger Infolocale database as a lead generator for upselling.

Questions and Answers

Here are some of the questions and answers from the webinar:

Question: I'm curious to hear about the pricing. Can you mention some prices what associations pay to advertise

David Moizan: We are in a period of Proof of Concept, POC, but we started with a price of 40 euros. I mean, 48 euros with the tax per classified in the newspaper. And if you buy multiple classifieds you will get a decreased price. For the moment digital only is free. That is, If you don't buy a print format, it's free. This is how we started charging again after Corona (it was offered for free during the Corona years). This is a really small river for the moment. But as the database is growing, and as long as it is not cannibalising, it opens the way for new development.

Question: There is also a site called Infolokal.fr with events and also with the self-service. So you have a national brand, but you decided not to show that in your presentation. How come?

David Moizan: It's touchy to bring to life another brand, so to speak, a media brand, which is fully self-service enriched. It can be seen as a competitor towards our media brands. So internally, it was quite, politically speaking, hard. So we've got this national brand, but discreet. It allows us to show to our sources the way their content easily is watched on mobile devices or on desktop. And sometimes it's more concrete for them because most of the time they are asking us, where am I distributed? You know, the digital world, sometimes for the sources, they are lost. They say, I'm sharing content. In the newspaper, I see it. I can touch it. But on the digital, I mean, I'm in the flow. Sometimes they say, where am I? Where am I distributed? So to answer that, I think the data is the solution. That's why we are sharing analytics so that they might gauge the efficiency of our system. I'm a little bit long about the initial question about brand infolocal.fr. For the moment, we are maintaining it.

Question: Do you have any financial figures on the classified business?
David Moizan: We are still in a test period. However I can share the fact that the platform Infolocale allows us to save approximately 2 million € in production cost every year.

In the very end of the webinar David Moizan adds a comment: “If there are editors and journalists in the audience, Infolocal is also a tool for journalists. I think I did not convey this idea that newsrooms can use Infolocal directly. Historically, Infolocale was designed as an alternative to pre-existing content: event announcements and practical information. I believe the system can be used to surface more ad-hoc content. Through the content called “articles”, Editorial teams and journalists can use it to 'mass-query' (instead of one-to-one, it's one-to-many) groups of associations. We insert questions into templates of articles. They can also react to current events to quickly gather testimonies, viewpoints, etc After that it can become an exploitable material.”

Useful links and contact information

Here follows useful links:

The webinar presentation can be downloaded here.

Here is a short video describing the concept of Infolocale (in French, however with subtitles in English)

The presenter of the case can be reached via his mobile number +33 6 14 03 59 95 or via e-mail david.moizan@sipa.ouest-france.fr . His LInkedIn profile is linkedin.com/in/david-moizan-14a9a13
Link to Groupe SIPA Ouest-France and its main news property: Ouest-France. The sub-group Actu is a chain of local news sites under one brand.
The products of Ouest France Technological Solutions:
- Mediego: A newsletter tool to boost audience engagement. For Mediego there are other publishers using this product in Switzerland, Denmark and France,
- Storm: A CMS to create, manage, and curate editorial content and live streams.
- InfoConnect: A single sign-on system for user account creation and authentication.
- Infolocal is described here (in french) and on this marketing page (also in french).

At the very end of the webinar Niklas Jonason presented some similar but still different concepts for self service:
- Townbase, based in Finland and the UK, offers SAAS for self service for the tourism industry and local news media
- Cruncho based in Stockholm, Sweden, use scraping for events
- Innocode, based in Ukraine, Norway and Sweden, offers SAAS-solutions that use self service for events
- Laidback Solutions , part of Atex and based in Sweden, offers self service solutions for print and online and a solution for religious communities
- DanAds, based in Stockholm, Sweden, for display ads
- Smartico, based in Germany and Bulgaria, offers self service to local media.
- Evolver Group , based in Germany, offers self service to local media.

Please let us know if there are other companies to list here. Email me at n.jonason@wan-ifra.org

You are welcome to contact the WAN-IFRA Innovate Local team, if you have questions or examples of similar cases.
Cecilia Campbell: c.campbell@wan-ifra.org
Niklas Jonason: n.jonason@wan-ifra.org