Koen Van Rhijn

Pebble Media as a startvehicle for a new organization. Together with colleagues from Mediahuis, Telenet/SBS and Proximus, we have brought cooperation in the advertising world to a new level. Based on the common belief and strategic vision that consolidation should lead to scale, expertise and a clear and simpler offer in the market, today I am helping to build the media sales house of the future. Since 2019, we have been working on the start-up and expansion of this new company. My responsibilities are focused on the strategic build-out of the company, organizational optimization, team collaboration, technology development & implementation and product, business & partner development. Through the Transformation Team, we are bringing focus and speed to change today. Choices are made within the broader strategic framework, teams and experts are involved and roll out together new processes and solutions. With each team, we jointly clarified the team mission, wrote out roles, knocked down yearly objectives and translated them into a roadmap. This leads to an immediate dynamic in the organization and cooperation between teams, in short, speed and focus. In the development of our products, the focus is on the development of a first party data ecosystem. In this way we create a maximum number of data points within the Ads & Data network to allow advertisers to purchase data segments or match their data with our data pool. In this way we open up new opportunities to optimize ad campaigns and this within the legal GDPR framework. But we see data more broadly. We connect all business, campaign and user data to be able to evaluate and improve the results of our work. We want to approach our available inventory with the most care and deploy campaigns in the most efficient way to ultimately maximize revenue with the best possible results for our clients, advertisers and publishers. We are making the full circle and are in a continuous process of change and improvement.

Developing a clear strategy together with the Board of Directors and keeping focus to evolve in a rapidly changing digital and technological market. Stakeholder management, almost permanent change management and keeping an up to date understanding and overview of the technical and legal possibilities of the market are the main success factors within my function. Building professional relations help to adjust this vision. We were also looking at what impact these digital changes are having on the "off line" media and what strategic and technological solutions we can propose in this framework. Given the inherently technological nature of the business, I am closely involved in discussions with technology providers. Concrete results:

● The development of the common purchasing platform, "Buymedia.be"

● The DaviD platform was successfully launched in early 2019. It collects data from different parties in a GDPR-compliant way. This data is analyzed, broken down into segments and offered to advertisers through the sales platform. After sales, participating data parties are compensated for the offered inventory and data through a self-developed remuneration model. Today, DaviD continues to serve as a source of inspiration for new data initiatives (both at home and abroad) and is further evolving within Ads & Data as the pillar of the entire first-party data ecosystem.

● Pebble Media has built successful partnerships with international media companies such as Linkedin, Spotify and Snapchat. In Belgium, Pebble Media broadened its social media offering with Linkedin and Snapchat, and was at the forefront of the development of a strong and high-quality audio offering through Spotify. Collaboration as a credo in the Pebble Media strategy, also provided a learning curve in terms of prospecting new partners, acquisition of competitor companies (Beweb), the search for new shareholders and ideas on a realistic operating model of an external media sales house.

Media, Marketing & Sales consultant Project Managment I worked for different advertisers and media companies during this period. Most projects were about media advice, others were the organisation of big events, such as the holiday fair for Neckermann/Thomas Cook.