DPG Media: How integrated workflows and data are fueling growth

Joshua Kreuger is a die-hard amateur racer who lives and breathes motorsports, where every fraction of a second counts.

But Joshua doesn't leave his passion for speed and precision on the track. Just as racers analyze every aspect of their car's performance to improve lap times, Joshua meticulously dissects data to increase subscription sales revenue for DPG Media, the largest publishing and media group in Belgium and the Netherlands. Home to over 80 media brands — including well-known names like NU.nl, AD, and HLN — DPG serves over 15 million viewers, readers, and listeners daily.

As Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Manager for DPG, Joshua is tasked with driving digital subscription revenue, placing his team squarely at the heart of the publisher’s digital transformation efforts. Joshua and his team of CRO specialists conduct a range of A/B and usability tests — examining everything from word choice and button colors to how much of an article should be behind a paywall — all to help DPG increase subscription sales.

While Joshua used several tools to manage experiment workflows and document the results, he knew he needed better tools to scale the company’s CRO program. After being introduced to Airtable by an industry colleague, Joshua’s natural curiosity and relentless search for ongoing improvement led him to explore it further.

“What drew me to Airtable was the flexibility it offered, especially regarding data visualization,” says Joshua. “Every time we met the limits of our use cases with our previous tools — and it happened often — we’d have to ask for assistance or just live with the restrictions. And it’s easy to lose motivation to try new things when the technology limits you.”

Not only were these incumbent tools hindering operational workflows — they were also stifling revenue growth. “Our previous tools were so disjointed and restrictive that we couldn’t run and analyze as many experiments as we were capable of, which ultimately affected conversion rates and revenue,” adds Joshua.

Soon, they made the move to Airtable. “We were able to quickly transport 60 existing experiments into our Airtable base,” says Joshua. “Our entire Airtable implementation was done within an afternoon.”

Instead of juggling siloed products from different vendors, all data and workflows are now connected in Airtable, saving money and enabling seamless collaboration across the company. 

Within the subscription sales department, five groups of CRO specialists — including those focused on online advertising, native advertising, paywalls, commercial websites, and email and direct mail — all run experiments and share their learnings within the same app. While the subscription sales team ran 60 experiments annually before, they can now run upwards of 300 with the velocity they’ve gained with Airtable — a staggering 500% increase in research output without additional headcount. 

And when the value of a single experiment can reach millions of dollars, the business impact of being able to run more experiments without more resources is nothing short of profound. 

Joshua’s team found by running and analyzing one experiment in Airtable, for example, that a simple wording change on the digital subscription package offering made customers significantly more likely to opt for a 3-year subscription period than one year. “The result from just this one experiment resulted in more than a  million pounds increase in annual subscription revenue,” explains Joshua.

With the real-time collaboration enabled by Airtable, teams can now tap into a wealth of data to make better decisions faster—decisions that ultimately increase subscription sales and enable DPG to hit revenue targets. It also allows Joshua to justify expanded investment in CRO initiatives.

“With Airtable, the ROI for everything our team does is readily available, with experiment results and learnings available instantly to any stakeholder that needs to see them,” says Joshua. “Instead of spending hours compiling data from multiple platforms and putting it into a nice-looking package for executives, I can focus on running more experiments that add business value.”

With 200 people across DPG now using Airtable for their workflows — including 60 people across 8 product and marketing teams that regularly access the subscription sales app — CRO experiments can be easily managed, documented, and reported on.

Now that these insights are at their fingertips, product and marketing teams can make data-informed decisions around what feature changes to implement—and what to avoid.

“Airtable helped us not only find and lean into winning experiments to increase annual subscription revenue by 500%, but also mitigate risks by identifying and avoiding planned feature changes that would have cost the company millions,” explains Joshua.

Scaling the CRO program with Airtable has also strengthened the company more than financially. “I’m most proud of our team's influence on the culture at DPG,” says Joshua. “By scaling our program — and showing the business value of experimentation — we’ve fundamentally changed our organization’s mindset and approach to work. Now, teams often start by posing a hypothesis to test instead of a specific initiative to follow. We’ve been able to embed a culture of curiosity that makes us better in everything we do at DPG.”

As Joshua looks to the future, he’s focused on examining AI's role in optimizing DPG’s digital assets. “AI is a huge opportunity, but it can also be a huge threat if we don’t tap into evolving user needs,” says Joshua. “No company has AI fully figured out yet. We need to experiment with how AI can support our digital revenue goals, and Airtable will be central to helping us tap into the value of those insights.”

More than that, he’s also eager to experiment with how Airtable’s AI offering could further accelerate crucial steps in his team’s workflows. “From extracting and comparing experiment insights at the record level to producing emails in bulk, using AI in Airtable could open up new use cases we’ve never even been able to imagine before,” says Joshua. “Airtable making generative AI accessible enough to apply to our workflows is a remarkable product development we’re excited to dig into.”