Media and Creative Industry

From Media Metropolis to Content City

Hamburg is a media city with great traditions: here, style-defining political magazines like "Der Spiegel", tabloid newspapers, magazines as "Der Stern", and Germany’s leading television news services "Tagesschau" and "Tagesthemen" are published here and broadcasted to international audience. But not only in journalism, but also in music and film, in advertising and PR, Hamburg’s creative heads and companies repeatedly deliver peak performance. For more than two decades, Hamburg has also been an important location of innovative companies active in the fields of online, software, and games. And it is not without reason that leading Internet giants such as Google, Facebook, Adobe Systems Engineering, Hootsuite and Yelp decided to choose Hamburg for headquarters in Germany.

There is no other German city, where media companies are as dominant and profitable as in Hamburg. As content city, Hamburg actively shapes the transformation of the media and digital industry. In Hamburg, innovative business models fall on fertile ground – enriched by creativity and strong merchant spirit.

With more than 200 companies, the Hanseatic City is also Germany’s leading location of the thriving games industry. Internationally successful industry players are headquartered in Hamburg. Together, the city’s three big online game companies, i.e. InnoGames, Goodgame Studios and Bigpoint, reach more than 760 million registered users worldwide. Around 9,700 Hamburg-based IT companies ensure a well-functioning digital infrastructure. Above all, the IT industry enables and drives digitisation, and thus opens up new possibilities for Hamburg content industry.

The Creative Mecca of Media and Digital Industries

The list of long-established advertising agencies in Hamburg is tantamount to a "who’s who" of the German advertising industry: FCB, Jung v. Matt or Scholz & Friends – all of these Hamburg-based companies have made advertising history. Even those once counted among the "young rebels", such as Grabartz & Partner, Kolle Rebbe, Philipp & Keuntje and Zum Goldenen Hirschen have become fixtures in the German advertising landscape.

And the next generation of the young "creative class" is raring to go. Hamburg’s advertising professionals are regarded as highly creative: from the international New York Festival to the national ADC competition in Hamburg – the top-ranking German advertisers in recent years have almost exclusively been Hamburg-based agencies. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Hamburg is considered to be the nation’s hotbed of creative advertising.

Hamburg has also been Germany’s design capital for many years, owing its reputation to such enterprising figures as Lothar Böhm, Rolf Heide, Peter Maly and Peter Schmidt. The city is home to 1,878 design firms – not even counting freelance designers.

In the digital sector, Hamburg has been successfully hosting industry meets and greets for many years. The city has also been promoting leading events such as Online Marketing Rockstars and NEXT conferences, the Social Media Week, and Reeperbahn Festival.