Van Rysel

Challenge

Performance is central to Van Rysel’s products, marketing, and communications. The brand wanted to understand how effectively its activities were reaching audiences and contributing to its position in the cycling industry.

Before Meltwater, the team managed media monitoring manually. When Van Rysel launched a product, team members searched for published articles and contacted publishers to gather coverage and audience figures. That process became harder to manage as the brand expanded internationally. Van Rysel did not always have the right contacts in every market, making it difficult to build a complete and consistent view of media performance.

“Given the volume of coverage we generate today, it simply wouldn't be possible to work the way we used to,” says Perrine Chudy, Global Communications Director at Van Rysel.

The team needed a more reliable way to monitor coverage, evaluate partnerships, and compare performance over time.

Solution

Van Rysel chose Meltwater because the platform was intuitive and supported by specialists who could help configure dashboards and interpret results.

“In our day-to-day work, time is limited, and realistically, we wouldn't always have the time to configure all these dashboards ourselves,” Chudy says. “Having a support team that understands our needs and can help us with that work is extremely valuable and enables us to be much more precise in our analysis.”

The team uses Media Intelligence to monitor coverage across Europe, North America, and Asia, including China. It can review activity related to campaigns, events, partnerships, and athlete participation in races, all from one platform.

Van Rysel also uses Social Listening to monitor community growth and content performance. The team compares these findings with website data and store traffic to build a broader view of campaign and event impact.

Historical data provides another layer of context. Van Rysel can compare current performance with results from three or four years ago, helping the team understand how the brand is developing over time. Plus, Meltwater alerts help the brand track developments in cycling and technology, keeping the team informed about changes relevant to its market.

Results

By replacing manual, market-by-market coverage collection with automated monitoring and dashboards, Van Rysel has reduced the work required to evaluate its global marketing activity. The team now has a more consistent view across Europe, Asia, and North America, faster context around partnership announcements and event-driven spikes, and visibility into brand exposure that would be missed by text-only monitoring.

Measuring the impact of partnerships

Van Rysel uses Meltwater to assess brand activity connected to the Decathlon CMA CGM cycling team and its collaborations with athletes including Pierre Gasly and Fabio Quartararo.

When the brand announced its partnership with Quartararo, Meltwater alerted the team to a spike in activity. Van Rysel could quickly assess the response and understand the resulting social conversation. It can also compare performance over time, including across its two-year partnership with Gasly.

Capturing visibility beyond written coverage

Meltwater’s visual listening and logo-recognition capabilities add another dimension to Van Rysel’s analysis. During the Tour de France, the team used the feature to identify logo appearances in images, including coverage that featured a rider, team, or partnership without mentioning the brand in the text. With those insights, the team can assess brand visibility and improve its product branding and design.

Connecting insights to decisions

When conversations are evolving fast, AI-generated summaries help Van Rysel understand spikes in activity without reviewing every individual data point. As buzz  grows around a particular topic or event, the team can quickly identify what happened, determine whether further investigation is needed, and respond while the conversation is still active.

In the long term, Van Rysel combines Meltwater findings with social media metrics, website data, and store traffic to build a broader view of campaign and event impact. “Instead of simply collecting data, we can understand it, interpret it, and take action based on the insights it provides,” Chudy says.