This year’s Health Lab by Burda took place on Thursday with a focus on overcoming upheaval and shaping the future. And the location was very special indeed – Munich’s Allianz Arena allowed the event to be held outdoors.
Burkhard Graßmann, managing director of BurdaNews, will now also serve as the spokesperson for the management board of BCN, Burda’s central marketing organisation. He will be directly responsible for “Media Sales” at BCN and, therefore, for developing Burda’s collaboration with media agencies. Michael Samak, who has been managing director of BCN since the start of 2016, will continue to manage direct customer support (“Client Services”), while Stefan Zarnic, BCN’s second managing director, will focus on the growing importance of digital marketing for Burda’s national media brands and on the continuous expansion of programmatic advertising.
Announcing this change with immediate effect, Board Member Philipp Welte explained that his decision was based on the increasing complexity of the advertising business, which also requires the managers of Burda’s central marketer to have a high degree of specialisation.
“We operate in an overcrowded yet shrinking national advertising market in which demands on our creative energy and digital expertise are continuously growing. If we want to stabilise our position as the market leader among magazine publishers in this extremely competitive environment, our services to this market must offer significantly better quality than those of our competitors.”
Philipp Welte, Board Member
To achieve this, he is looking to BCN’s three experienced managers, who each have different areas of expertise.
Burkhard Graßmann’s new role at BCN will be in addition to his role as managing director of BurdaNews (Focus, TV Spielfilm, etc.). To meet continually increasing requirements in media agency business at the Frankfurt site, Heide Reichmann has now decided to concentrate on supervising the Frankfurt-based agencies as Head of Media Sales. She will hand over her role as Director Media Sales at BCN to Andrea Becher, who has been responsible for framework agreements with media agencies since the start of the year as Director Sales Development at the Burda Magazine Holding; she will retain this responsibility in her new role.
