Infolocale, Ouest France’s self-service platform for local events, fuels revenue and engagement

This is an edited version of a case study that originally appeared on our Innovate Local website.

By Niklas Jonason

The platform allows locals to communicate and market events across a spectrum of categories such as entertainment, sports, church services, evening courses and more.

The events can be published in several formats in newspapers, as well as on news media websites and in apps.

Infolocale has proven to be a valuable tool for cost savings and content enrichment, David Moizan, Director of Marketing at Groupe SIPA Ouest France, told participants during an Innovate Local webinar in March.

By shifting from manual entry of information to collecting shared content from local sources, Ouest France saves an estimated 1.8 to 2 million euros per year.

The platform not only enriches newspapers and digital platforms it also fosters stronger community engagement by providing a valuable service for locals.

One of France's largest media companies with 1,200 journalists

Groupe SIPA Ouest France is a major French media company, primarily known as the owner of the newspaper Ouest-France, the most widely read French-language daily newspaper.

Based in Rennes in northwestern France, its core activity encompasses five daily and nearly 100 weekly newspapers, digital platforms, radio stations, and magazines. It is owned by the "Association pour le soutien des principes de la démocratie humaniste."

Ouest France ranks among the top three digital media outlets in country, with Actu.fr and 20 Minutes (co-owned with the Belgian group Rocel) also holding significant positions. The group has 4,200 employees, including 1,200 journalists, and collaborates with 4,000 local press correspondents.

From content focus to advertising platform

Ouest-France's journey with Infolocale began in 2006 with a focus on content, about the same time as Mark Zuckerberg was launching Facebook.

The initial objective, for Ouest France, was to generate cost savings and create a comprehensive inventory of local events. The challenge was the high cost and time-consuming nature of manually processing heterogeneous information received from various sources.

To address this, Ouest France shifted to a model of collecting shared content directly from local sources, empowering these sources to input content themselves through self service.

Over time, Infolocale has evolved into a powerful content creation and advertising platform, generating revenue and driving engagement.

Infolocal has progressively broadened the variety and quality of input content. Initially focused on events, the platform now includes activities, articles, and entities:

Local Events Calendar: This feature allows users to announce concerts, shows, local festivals, conferences, charity events, and other meetings.

​Leisure Activities: Users can share information about courses, cultural activities, painting, drawing, sewing, sports, and weekly meetups. For example, a hiking association can post its Sunday outings. Also things that you can enjoy all year round, such as language or cultural activities or weekly meetups.

​Articles: Associations can publish event reports, member profiles, and explanations of initiatives. This feature offers more freedom of expression allowing for longer texts and the inclusion of videos, photos, and hyperlinks. Articles, which is probably the most "touchy" content currently, we are allowing associations to write what can be called, "an article." This is not a classified. It can be an event report, the presentation of a member, the explanation of the launch of an initiative, etc. It brings more freedom to express details. The text can be long. The association can load video, photos and hyperlinks,

Entities: This function allows for sharing details about local organisations. It can be used by editors and be considered as exploitable content. We can, for example, give editors a list of specific types of entities such as sport associations, environmental associations, or a type of professional too, like restaurant, hostel. We've got location, opening hours, service provided, contact information, and it can be exploited to make articles, inventories, etc.

The four contents above can then be distributed to media that use it in several different formats.

Distribution and monetisation

The content shared on Infolocale is distributed across various media, including newspapers, websites, digital platforms, and apps. This widespread distribution helps monetise local audiences while providing a valuable service to the community.

They also share content with municipalities and touristic offices. For example, 80 percent of municipalities in Brittany are using Infolocale as a source for event calendars.

Infolocale offers combinatorial approaches-geographical, thematic, and semantic-to distribute content streams effectively. Multiple combined filters allow users to leverage content by categories, type of organisation, topics, and localisation. Users can choose categories, such as the type of organisation they want to use as sources.

Users can choose a topic, location, age, date range, or belonging to certain sport federations. They can decide what type of events and the price you want to share with your audience, Moizan said.

For example, users could choose to select free events for this weekend in a specific area. Or, on Wednesday, they might want activities for children.

Even if a village has only 1,000 inhabitants, the widget can be set up and there will always content, Moizan said.

If the content is not directly linked to the locality, it will enlarge the scope so that it will bring events in the region around the village. Users can enlarge the area covered by 10 kilometers, 20 kilometers, 30 kilometers, and so on.

​Everything can be customised so that users can also feed in their topic pages with content from Infolocale, such as topics as cycling and rugby, or dance, cinema, theatre or painting.

The platform also utilizes widgets embedded in local and topic pages to enhance content visibility and user engagement. The platform also lets users create print ads as can be seen below.

Ouest-France has used Infolocale to provide content for newsletters, PDFs, thematic supplements such as summer guides or flea markets.

Recently, they started to distribute weekly articles with event programmes with the help of AI through using our own secured AI-powered tool using different AI models and AI engines, Moizan said.

To sum up the collection and the distribution of content, publishers can share any events, any activities, articles or given information about organisations. They can connect digital services with other providers. If they've got a ticketing account with a third-player they can use that, too.

​Concerning the split between journalistic content and content from Infolocale, some visual tricks have been implemented. The editorial team wants the content generated by the sources to be clearly identifiable.

This is done through graying out content from Infolocale, and having the Infolocale logo appearing on the photos provided through the self-service.

So far, Moizan said Ouest-France group's Infolocale platform has achieved:

• More than 60,000 users each year…
• ….Including 45,000 associations as well as professionals and municipalities
• Almost 400,000 content elements are collected each year. In addition to self service, they aggregate different databases. "Our system is agnostic, so to speak," Moizan said.
• Infolocale started with non-profit entities. During the first wave of COVID, they opened Infolocale to advertisers for free so that they might inform readers (both print and digital) about opening hours, services provided, etc.
• At the end of 2020, more than 7,000 professionals had registered. Among them, more than 70% are active, meaning they actively share event content. Four years later, in February 2024, the publisher decided to launch a Proof of Concept, by reopening Infolocale for advertisers.

WAN-IFRA Staff

executivenews@wan-ifra.org