Audacity is the leitmotif of the 2022 edition of One to One Biarritz. This quality is also central in the “business” from Meetic!
Cedric_Doux_Photographer
Céline Boudière, Chief Marketing & Digital Officer of Meetic
: Challenging and daring is clearly in Meetic’s DNA! Meetic is at the heart of human relations: we are therefore obliged to follow societal and technological developments – in particular the most used means of communication -, to transform and reinvent ourselves to continue to be a benchmark in the sector. from dating, in France and in Europe. This results in the proliferation of innovations, in particular those related to the digital transformation of communication methods, which was accelerated by the Covid-19 crisis. We are thus constantly adapting to the ways in which people connect with each other, for example the video call, pushed during the confinements, which is now adopted by the majority of our users. The latter appreciate, if they feel a feeling after an exchange of messages, to see themselves on video, before meeting in “real life”. It is a filter that reassures and re-humanizes digital dating.
Another innovation, recently deployed by the brand, is audio: since April 2022, Meetic users can add the recording of their voice to their profile. What does this new feature bring?
Audio has become predominant in the means of communication and in the uses of single people, with the listening of podcasts. The voice is also at the heart of seduction and the desire to meet people. This is why, in addition to the photo and the descriptive bio, we give the possibility to the user to leave a voice note, on a subject of your choice, which allows it to reveal itself and break the ice, with lightness. Again, it’s about trying to put the real and authentic in the way of meeting online. We are seeing a very good adoption rate: 30 million audios have been listened to (Meetic figures, August 2022, editor’s note).
You also launched 9 months ago “live rooms”“. What is it about ?
We started from the observation that people no longer wanted to be asynchronous: they expect an instant response. The idea is therefore to offer singles who feel lonely the opportunity to connect, at any time during the day, to join a room determined by age and with specific themes – centers of interest (culinary, video games, etc.) or entertainment programs (Koh Lanta, The Voice, for example). Connected people can simply listen or express themselves, and, if they want to deepen the discussion, go into one to one with someone. It’s not due speed dating, but the idea is to create connections, with a good dose of humour. On average, people stay connected for an hour, and some, “power users”, participate 4 to 5 times a week in rooms.
In terms of live and innovative format, there are also the Twitch lives inaugurated during the 2020 confinement: how are they interesting for Meetic?
We are ending the third season of lives on Twitch. Here, the idea is to be able to approach subjects in a different way, because we take angles that allow us to target people who are complementary to those reached by television and by our traditional media. It’s about talking about dating again with a target in their thirties, with subjects like: what are the codes of dating. We also give a lot of advice and support via our love coach – Élodie Cavalier -, via an influencer who tells about her life and her journey and gives credibility to our discourse around the meeting, and via testimonials from couples. In terms of reach, we reached 25% of women between the ages of 24 and 35 with this show – that is, people who have heard of it. And for Meetic, live Twitch is also content that we can amplify and use elsewhere, in capsules, for example.
The metaverse is a popular concept. Are you planning to design a dating experience in a virtual universe?
We are lucky to belong to the Match group and, within this group, the subject is the table. It won’t just be an initiative or a partnership in France, because we want to enter the metaverse through the front door. We are therefore actively working on it, but we want to take the time to do well, with the right ambition and the right level of quality. It is possible to reinvent a dating universe in the metaverse – it can even facilitate online dating thanks to gaming – but what will always guide us is the end goal: to recreate a love bond in real life.
In 2022, Meetic unveiled its new brand platform “Serious dating, crazy love”. Soon a new Meetic ad?
Yes, early January 2023, because it’s a time of year for good resolutions! We are on this positioning of real and authentic love stories and we will remain on this theme correlated to our platform “Serious dating, crazy love”: it is not because we are looking for a serious relationship that we cannot not inject lightness and audacity. We show very different couples and very different types of love, always with a touch of humor.
Meetic is engaged in a digital transformation, but also an environmental one. You announce that you want to reduce the company’s carbon footprint by 10% per year in 2023. How do you plan to achieve this?
It’s ambitious, because it’s twice what the Paris agreements require. The approach is to work on responsible innovations. For this, two times a year, we organize hackathons to seek new ideas from multidisciplinary teams. Recently, we did an “eco hack”: we sought ideas from employees and emerged the development of a “green tool” in order to provide internal information on ecological issues and to measure the impact of our actions. An app like Meetic is very greedy in storage due to photos, videos, audio… We try, for example, to compress photos and we monitor the carbon impact of our servers and data. We also monitor the footprint of our online and offline marketing campaigns and, at the same time, we select more responsible partners or we choose to donate part of the advertising earnings to associations. There is also a more individual level, that of employees, with regard to travel or heating. But for that, it must first be shown that the company is acting.