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Henneo

Spanish media group catches the AI wave

HENNEO undertakes a wide-ranging initiative to integrate AI across its operations.

Adapting to technological change

HENNEO is a Spanish publisher whose legacy dates back to 1895 with the first issue of the independent newspaper, Heraldo de Aragón. Since then, they have acquired numerous publications and branched out into television production, reaching an audience of over 25 million today.

Since funding Hiberus, one of the 10 largest Spanish technology consultancies, HENNEO has promoted an alliance of more than 40 media outlets to accelerate digital transformation in journalism, both at home and abroad. HENNEO knew that generative artificial intelligence (AI) was the next frontier, and they wanted to get on board early.

“Everyone talks about AI for editorial, but we believe that AI can impact much more than that,” says Miguel Madrid, HENNEO’s chief digital officer. “But we didn’t have a holistic view of the business, of all the areas that could be impacted by the AI revolution.” So, to harness AI across all aspects of the business – from editorial and advertising to analytics and multimedia – HENNEO enlisted the expertise of Google News Initiative (GNI) in 2023.

Leveraging AI across departments

With GNI’s support, HENNEO embarked on an ambitious initiative called HENNEO AI 360 2023. The goal was to harness AI, particularly generative AI tools, to increase efficiency; attract new audiences and retain existing ones; and free up journalists to focus on researching, fact checking, and meaningful storytelling.

HENNEO met with GNI frequently as they scoped out projects and established an AI taskforce of C-level executives to oversee the strategy. An AI Hub, made up of 30 employees from diverse backgrounds, handled the research and training, settling on 60 projects out of 150 proposals. “We knew that we had a lot of good ideas,” says Miguel, “but being able to talk them through with Google and get validation from GNI really changed the mindset of the company.”

The projects included leveraging AI for advanced data analytics and for enhancing advertising personalization. HENNEO also used AI to adjust creative content to fit requirements for 11 advertising formats with very positive results.

“To keep up with the AI revolution, we can’t focus on just one part of the business. We need to have a broader vision, and GNI helped us to make our vision a reality.”
Miguel Madrid
Chief Digital Officer, HENNEO
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Freeing up journalists to work on journalism

HENNEO began using a generative AI tool to suggest titles and meta descriptions for their content and, in doing so, tripled the amount of time users spend on their sites, thereby boosting revenue.

In doing so, they tripled their pageviews and the amount of time users spend on their sites, thereby boosting revenue. Just as importantly, the tool halved the time journalists spent completing tasks like updating the content taxonomy, a system that organizes content to make it easier for users to find information. HENNEO has seen similar time-saving results using AI to adapt social media content for the various platforms. “The biggest takeaway has been that AI – when combined with human supervision – gives our journalists more time to create journalism content rather than spending that time on all the tasks surrounding the content,” Miguel says.

With this success, HENNEO is now expanding how they use generative AI going forward. They plan on testing the new version of Gemini, Google’s generative AI model and they are also working to streamline the technology by integrating all of their editorial AI in Xalok, their content management system (CMS), and are developing a solution, via API or Chrome extension, for partners who do not use the same CMS.

“Our approach to AI has really been a change of mindset within HENNEO – a cultural change and an educational effort,” says Miguel. “That’s been quite an experience for us, and we couldn’t have done it so quickly without GNI.”

Google News Initiative — News Ideas

All around the world, news publishers are innovating ways to engage their audiences. From digital distribution and subscriptions to real-time analytics and AI, to delivering what readers want and giving readers a voice, they are using technology to reimagine the news — growing revenue and keeping journalism going strong. Their insights might inspire your own next big News Idea.

  • 300% increase in pageviews
  • 50% time saved on article production
  • 50% time saved on social media content creation
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