Two months after the arrival of its new CEO Guillaume Collard, RTL Belgium will adopt a new internal organisation, centred on content, the media company announced on Monday.
Currently, no staff restructuring is planned. Digital will take a much larger focus since it will now be considered a medium in its own right, alongside TV and radio.
Since the new CEO Guillaume Collard took office in mid-June, replacing Philippe Delusinne, working groups were created and identified new avenues for development based on the three strategic priorities of the next few years, announced RTL.
This will involve a “boosting content” strategy in the areas of news, entertainment, co-production and sport, accelerating digital transformation across the entire company. There will also be a focus on increasing the value of brands through content, and programs, among others.
RTL Belgium also intends to rely on innovation to “strengthen its leadership” and on “increased cross-functionality” in the way of collaborating across the different teams. A new team will thus be responsible for ensuring “the acceleration of digital in the company, the collection and monetisation of data and to place innovation at the heart of the company’s operating methods”.
Trade unions react to reorganisation
“In general, this new organisation seems to us to be at the service of a thoughtful, coherent, bold strategy that meets our expectations”, reacted the unions of RTL at the end of an extraordinary works council during which this new strategy was presented to them.
“Among the strategic priorities, the acceleration of the digital transformation seems essential and fundamental to us. As staff representatives, we also support this ambition to entertain, inform but also to ‘bring people together’, an essential societal objective for RTL Belgium. “, they added.
The unions will however be “attentive to the consequences of this major development for all staff” and are waiting to discover the strategy of the 2023-2025 plan, which they wish to be “ambitious and innovative, in particular in terms of content”.
New CEO pushing for digital switch
“This new organisation is a first step that places content at the centre of our priorities. This will allow us to develop ever more attractive content across all our media (TV, Digital, Radio) for all of our audiences and to to be even more commercially attractive for advertisers”, stated the new CEO of RTL Guillaume Collard.
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Collard was appointed as the head of RTL Belgium in mid-June after last year's takeover of its parent company RTL Group by Rossel and DPG for €250 million.
The appointment of the 30-year-old, ex-CEO of Eleven Sports in Belgium, was in line with the ambition to accelerate the digital transformation of the group’s radio and television channels and to guide collaboration with the new shareholders.
The media group IPM (La Libre, DH, LN24…) and the advertising management of the Mediahuis and Telenet groups, Ads & Data, have however lodged an appeal with the Dutch-speaking Court of Appeal in Brussels to cancel the green light given by the Belgian Competition Authority (ABC) to the takeover of RTL Belgium.
