What a ride it has been. We are beyond happy to announce that we have been elected into the final stage of the “STADIEM Open Call 1”.

Out of more than 400 startups that originally applied to this program roughly 12 months ago, only 4 were now selected to take part in the final stage – the “pilot” stage.

STADIEM is a highly competitive program that attracts the most promising media-tech startups, scaleups, and SMEs, to participate in up to 4 cascading stages: Match, Develop, Integrate, and Pilot- with each stage getting more selective. At each stage, the STADIEM committee re-evaluates the remaining startups and decides on which startups are eligible to move to the next stage of the program, which comes with additional financing and other resources. This STADIEM project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 951981.

In spring of 2021, out of 400 applicants, the 40 most promising media-tech startups were selected by the STADIEM committee and were given a chance to find a corporate partner to shape the media landscape of tomorrow. Out of those 40, 16 advanced to the 2nd phase: Develop. From there, only 12 got accepted into the Integrate phase. The program now enters its final stage with the Pilot – eligible for only 4 startups, and Zazu is one of them.

This is a huge milestone for Zazu as this achievement is once again testament to the potential and applicability of Web Stories and the Zazu Story Editor in particular for the media & e-commerce space in Europe. Together with our corporate partner Roularta Media Group (with more than 60 brands under management) we are now setting out to publicly launch Web Stories across their portfolio – starting with the brand “Flair”.

“Content on publishers’ websites misaligns with the experience present on social media platforms (e.g. Instagram). Web Stories can meet those experience and are the next-gen visual storytelling format for the web. We are very excited to run a pilot together with ZAZU during the next coming months and evaluate the potential.”

– Erwin Danis, Head of Innovation @ Roularta

Thanks to the automation services developed by Zazu during the STADIEM program, Web Stories now come almost effortlessly to Roularta’s brands and allow them to scale up production and display of Web Stories without loss of quality or additional human effort.

We will soon publish more news on the project and how this can also help your company increase engagement and add additional monetization options without effort.

Until then,

Philipp