Meet the 67-year-old French weekly using vintage content to find new audiences online

Is greater use of technology changing the traditional role of publishers? (0:03)

It’s changed because you have to think that whatever you have that is good and exclusive you have to put away immediately, but in your own way so it’s like when and how do you decide to publish it right away. So you have to be very careful to keep your quality and to keep your DNA. For example live videos, even if the quality is not that great, it’s the access that makes you great. Like Paul McCartney talking about his daughter is really funny and he’s really relaxed. And it’s nice because you can bring people – the readers, the followers – to a place they would never have been to without that. 

What was behind your launch of Instagram Vintage? (0:48)

We realised that we had treasures in terms of our photo archives. Photos that we don’t really show around because there’s no occasion to show them around in print. So with a photo editor and myself, we created Paris Match Vintage, make sure that two pictures are posted every day and over the weekend. And in 6 months we got to 10,000 followers with great feedback and really interesting engagement from people. So we think it’s very interesting and it also made us realise how many treasures we had. We realised that we could also organise photo shows, and do books, and I think that it was very interesting for us. 

Paris Match seems to embrace the use of social media… (1:32)

The social networks are really interesting because it gives you visibility and you find communities that wouldn’t know your brand as much, like younger people. So Instagram: of course we’re very visually orientated so Instagram, both for Vintage and for Paris Match, is very important for us to show our quality and to show what we do visually.

And what about Twitter and Facebook? (1:56)

So Twitter we have our Political Editor, Bruno Jeudy, with 250K+ Twitter followers, which is a lot in France, and he’s a great tweet clasher so that always makes the news a lot. And it’s very interesting because he’s in the field all the time. He can share exclusives and news that you wouldn’t put in the magazine because it would be too late – it can be really really important for the brand. 

We did the live mentions on Facebook during the fashion shows in Paris with backstage interviews of models and celebrities. So they were really fun videos live that we broadcast on our Facebook page.

Finally, tell us about the app you launched earlier this year (2:43)

This year we launched an app called Match Point. It’s an app within our app, a mobile app. It’s a kind of daily digest, very visually exciting, we post every evening at 6. There are always six items, sometimes more, but usually there are six items, organised like there’s a cover story, there’s a quote, there is the story – more text – there is a slideshow, there is a number, and there is a video. So it’s like a mini Paris Match every evening with that mix we’ve had for all these years with war and news and celebrity and fun and animals that people can have. And also it’s a modern way for us to show what we are, who we are, and that Paris Match touch on a modern platform.

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