The ÖAMTCis an independent, non-profit association supporting motorists. To this day, more than 2 million members rely on the services of ÖAMTC. Whether the topic is road safety, travel, leisure, or general concerns.
The association commissioned us to design and implement a digital strategy for the magazine “auto touring ”. The magazine is intended to be published ten times a year and sent to all members of ÖAMTC. This gives it a circulation of around 2.800.000 readers per issue, making it Austria’s car magazine with the widest reach.
In collaboration with the “auto touring” team, we created a detailed concept plan that enables content to be published in a digital premium-magazine format. The first step was to create a publishing engine based on STRG.CMS that can publish articles in 1400 different layout combinations. The project was successful, and the market response was excellent. As a result, ÖAMTC decided to implement all future digital transformation projects with the support of our team.
Since 2015, we have been its central partner for all digitalisation projects. To date, we have developed 21 projects, ranging from internal knowledge management and the intranet for all business units to the club’s classic B2C portals. As a mobility club, ÖAMTC is aware of the radical changes expected over the next 10 to 15 years. For this reason, this gradual transformation also needed to be reflected in the outbound communication strategy. More specifically, we developed services that secure the association’s central role in the future ahead. To maintain a consistent tone across a wide range of projects, we developed a general style guide that serves as the basis for all future concepts. We organised extensive workshops and drove planning together with the editorial teams of the individual sections in order to map the path “from content to service to product” at all levels. This editorial consulting, combined with a consistent graphic definition, led to rapid development in subsequent projects. We also integrated the travel agency into the content, so that personalised and context-dependent offers are displayed across all areas of the site. This led to a doubling of online bookings and, as a result, to a significantly stronger eCommerce share on the pages. Overall, the system was well received by all employees and is now the central information and communication platform. In architectural terms, the system we built for ÖAMTC is certainly the most complex instance we have built with STRG.CMS and our entire technology stack. In this case, the CMS acts as the central digital asset management system for all digitally used content. This ranges from the classic but highly “playful” auto touring articles, through all points of interest (POI), to the collected content of the knowledge base and the products of the eCommerce areas. All content can be linked with other content and can also be used in all sub-projects. User management accesses a central member management system via interfaces and performs continuous data synchronisation. Naturally, ÖAMTC placed great emphasis on the GDPR, and all processes were mapped accordingly.
In the portal management of the individual areas, editors can intervene directly in most workflows and user journeys. A WYSIWY editor is available for this purpose, enabling automated and/or manual population. 12 upstream systems are connected via bidirectional interfaces. A dedicated content API was developed for delivery from the DAM in order to operate the entire system headlessly. The frontends have been implemented with VUE.js since 2016. This creates a significantly stronger application character, and the system can also be distributed across its server system. Due to its overall size, ÖAMTC operates its own data centre, where all services are hosted and operated.