Annick Bongers will step down as program director of Play Media

After ten years at the helm of the programming of the Play Media channel group, Annick Bongers is giving her career a different direction. She is replaced by three men.

Major change at media group Play Media. Program director Annick Bongers (54) will resign from her position at the beginning of June after ten sometimes turbulent years. She is taking a six-month professional break before deciding where and in what role she wants to continue in the future. “I look back on those ten years with great pleasure, but it is time to recharge,” says Bongers.

Bongers was tasked in 2014 to get the channel group back on track after a difficult period. When SBS Belgium, as the group was then called, was taken over by De Vijver Media in 2012, the original ambition was to transform the commercial channel into a kind of Woestijnvis TV – the production house of De Vijver, which until then had been the Flemish TV channel. landscape colored with programs for the VRT. However, that mayonnaise turned out to be unsuitable, which meant strategic adjustments had to be made.

It was up to Bongers, who himself worked for Woestijnvis for a long time, to reconcile the DNA of the production house with the more commercial direction that SBS needed. That became a path of trial and error, but Bongers gradually succeeded in making that spread the DNA of the transmitter group. Under her reign, the successful program ‘De mol’ was taken out of the freezer and Studio 100 celebrity Gert Verhulst actually became a voice in the public debate. Last spring, the Play channels together achieved a market share of 20.1 percent in the commercial target group. Ten years ago that figure was only 16.8 percent.

A lot also happened behind the scenes: cable company Telenet gradually took over the entire company and renamed it Play Media. This was accompanied by a high turnover in the boardrooms, with almost all top people in the organization gradually leaving the ship. Now that Bongers is stepping down from her role, the last of the Mohicans of the old SBS is disappearing from the management committee and the ‘telenetization’ of the group appears to be complete.

Striking: Bongers is replaced by three people. Martijn Bal will take charge of all Play content from June 10, Ken Ceulemans about the programming strategy, and Kristof Demasure – today spokesperson for the group – will be responsible for developing the current affairs and information strategy. In the election year, the company wants to pay more attention to politics, including several special episodes of the talk show ‘Gert’s table’ with the leaders of the most important political parties.