Burda Style Group and Deutsche Telekom launch strategic alliance in the people and lifestyle segment
Their object is to build the biggest premium people portal for women as the core target group.
Deutsche Telekom and Burda Style Group (Bunte, InStyle, freundin, BurdaStyle) have agreed on a far-reaching strategic alliance, which will link the BUNTE brand and content exclusively with the t-online.de portal. The two partners offer specific core competencies that harmonize perfectly in the innovative cooperation model. t-online.de, with 15.9 million unique users Germany's biggest general-interest portal, and BUNTE, the biggest people magazine in Europe, are joining forces to set up the premium people portal with the broadest reach for its core target group, namely women.
Under the terms of the partnership, Bunte.de will be an integral element of those parts of the t-online.de network that address women's issues. One aspect of this integration will be for BUNTE.de to exclusively supply content for the people and lifestyle segment on the t-online.de portal.
As a result, the t-online.de portal will give Internet users even faster access to the latest and most exciting stories covered by the Burda Style Group's media. At the same time, Bunte.de will integrate the Musicload, Gamesload, Videoload and wetter.info services as well as general RSS feeds from t-online.de. Bunte.de services will also link t-online.de users to other content on the platform. t-online.de aims to attract a greater percentage of women to its platform and, at the same time, increase the growth options for its "load" services.
"We are combining the strengths of the two companies in an innovative way, with the object of becoming market leader in the online and lifestyle segment. We greatly look forward to close cooperation with a strong partner such as the Burda Style Group," says Harald Eisenächer, member of Deutsche Telekom's Products & Innovation segment board. "We are convinced that this will greatly boost the value of t-online.de and Bunte.de for our customers, and will lay the foundation for a long-term partnership."
Philipp Welte, member of the Hubert Burda Media Board responsible for Publishing, underlines: "This alliance will set a new trend, because the strategies of the two companies harmonize perfectly and we see ourselves as complementary partners, not rivals, in the digital world. The alliance thrives on the fact that each partner contributes its own individual expertise, and ours is that we offer the best journalistic network and know - and tell - the most exciting people stories."
Alongside the cooperation on content, DTAG’s subsidiary InteractiveMedia, the online marketer with the broadest reach in Germany, will assume responsibility for marketing the Bunte.de site as of January 1, 2010. Marketing proceeds will be shared. This gives InteractiveMedia one of the women-specific portfolios with the broadest reach among online marketers in Germany. In view of this major new strategic alliance, the successful and trusting marketing cooperation between Bunte.de and Tomorrow Focus Sales will expire effective December 31, 2009.
About Deutsche Telekom AG Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies with almost 150 million mobile customers, around 40 million fixed-network lines and over 17 million broadband lines (as of June 30, 2009). Its product brands are T-Home (fixed-network telephony, broadband Internet), T-Mobile (mobile communications), and