Ada Mercier, director of Journal de Femmes, explains how pure player data feeds editorial processing to offer tailor-made measures to advertisers
JDN. Le Journal des Femmes is the leader in the women’s niche with 15 million unique visitors per month on average: what do you know about your readers?
Ada Mercier. Our leadership in the women’s segment in France was once again confirmed on June 18 by the 7th edition of the ACPM’s OneNext Influence study, which adds the CSP+ print and digital audiences. While we don’t have a print edition, the study ranks us 8e media in audience among all French titles.
We have all the classic data on our readers that our competitors may also have (age, region, origin of traffic, CSP, household composition, consumption behavior of our content, etc.). Our difference is in the volume of our data and in the representativeness that we have of French women, which are unmatched.
Thanks to the behavioral data on our site, we know precisely what makes them react, on our forums for example, what keeps them there or what makes them leave. Their reading behavior allows us to detect rising topics, consumption trends, changes in behavior, etc.
You say that women are not always where we expect them. Can you illustrate your points with concrete cases of systems offered to advertisers?
Advertisers often seek us out with a specific idea of target and message, centered on the product they wish to promote. In practice, we notice that in their initial pitch they often tend to miss the right targets and communicate in a way that is not the most relevant. The anti-wrinkle cream designed for women aged over 40 CSP+ is not only of interest to this target. We see that younger women on smaller budgets consume it on a daily basis. The content, which we know how to angle, will allow the advertiser to attract all those to whom their product really speaks, instead of depriving themselves of this by targeting a data segment based on restrictive personae.
Our role is also to show them in what way, with what message, what angle, what hook and in what context they will really be able to attract the interest of readers. A product for fatigue will not sell if it is not placed in a broader context that addresses, for example, lack of sleep linked to summer heatwaves.
This data is leveraged both in real time through programmatic channels and in the form of advice and special operations. Can you tell us more?
Our data feeds the data available on marketplaces for activations in real time and over time. They also enhance our expertise at the service of advertisers in order to offer them tailor-made infiltration and SEO/GEO systems. In the case of infiltration, it is an editorial panel designed by our teams which accompanies the article and which highlights the products of our partners. We specify that this is a commercial partnership, even if we only offer products that we have tested and considered to be qualitative and relevant. The infiltration can also be accompanied by a display device, wrapping, in-stream, native, retargeting on target and on statistical twins presenting similar reading behaviors, etc. It’s a tailor-made, ad hoc choice.
And what about your SEO/GEO and social systems?
On SEO/GEO, we integrate brands either into existing content or into new content, which are necessarily very well referenced due to the relevance of our editorial treatment and the popularity of our content. For example, we extracted more than 30,000 queries corresponding to the entire semantic universe addressed by products around the skin and hair of a major brand in the beauty sector, and the Journal des Femmes was the site most cited by ChatGPT.
As for social, but also Discover and our newsletters, for us it’s about pushing content that will attract the attention of our readers and transform them. It is an editorial logic which consists of catching our audience on the fly, at the moment when their intention is not necessarily manifested.
In both cases, it is our knowledge of our targets and how to address them that allows us to offer effective systems that are much more efficient for advertisers.
LLMs threaten the media by cutting them off from their organic traffic from search. What are you doing to counter this trend?
Conversational engines did not take us by surprise because Google has been providing answers in a zero-click approach for a long time. The fact is that people continue to need to dig and see the information. They are looking for expert and reliable media on topics as personal as beauty, health, diet, etc. Furthermore, it is also important that we do not remain dependent solely on search. This is why we are developing on Discover, on social, including on growing networks like Pinterest and Reddit, and on direct relationships with our audiences by working on the relevance of our content (CRM, newsletters, push, etc.).
