Céline Daugenet “Giving a voice to ordinary women”

Before launching Simone Media, Céline Daugenet held significant positions in journalism, notably as editor-in-chief of the Grand Journal. She leveraged her experience to create Simone Media, which stands out with its social pop editorial line.

In 2018, you co-founded Simone Media. What motivated this initiative?

When I proposed the project to Prisma in 2018, I started from three observations:

Firstly, the underrepresentation of women in traditional media. On the radio or television where I had worked for 10 years, we tended to always invite the same experts, mostly men.

Secondly, I noticed that more and more people, especially young ones, were abandoning TV and radio to spend more time on social media. Unlike in the United States, where many media like Now This or AJ+ existed on these platforms, apart from Brut which had just launched, in France there were few or no media on these platforms.

Finally, on a personal level, I did not identify with traditional women’s magazines. To support the Metoo movement and the empowerment movement that had begun, I wanted to give a voice to ordinary women who resembled me more, to propose new role models that were easier to identify with.

Can you introduce us to Simone Media? What messages does this media convey and what type of content do you produce?

Simone Media is a social pop and engaged media created in 2018 that has met with incredible success, now boasting over 2 million subscribers. If you have a daughter, sister, or niece aged 18 to 25, chances are she knows Simone. Why the name Simone? It is firstly a reference to two great feminists, Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Veil, but also to Simone Louise de Pinet de Borde des Forest, the first French woman to obtain a driving license in 1929, and finally to Simone, my great-grandmother.

We have become a reference among social media, thanks to our very high engagement rate of around 20%, often higher than that of major players like Brut and Konbini. This rate, measured by the number of interactions and comments on each of our posts, indicates our ability to generate conversation on the topics we cover. It’s particularly interesting because while it’s possible to artificially boost content dissemination on social networks through media promotion, shares, comments, and likes are all organic. This demonstrates the strong attachment of our community to the Simone brand and the trust we have built with millennials and Gen Z through this conversational media.

From a business perspective, we have also succeeded in our gamble, as Simone Media is now profitable. Thanks to the strength of the brand, we can develop numerous diversification projects in real life and not solely depend on platform algorithms.

In the coming months, while continuing to develop our community and our diversification projects, we will rely on the trust built with our community to offer new services and experiences. Our ambition is to become the leading conversational female media reference for millennials and Gen Z. We also aim to further develop solution journalism. We no longer want to just tell the world’s stories but position ourselves as an actor capable of providing real solutions to our community.

What actions taken with Simone are you most proud of? Why?

Our business model primarily relies on commercial partnerships we build with brands that share our values and commitments.

Thanks to the editorial legitimacy we have built on all engagement topics such as gender equality, ecology, and inclusion, we can support companies that want to communicate on these themes and make a difference.

For instance, we worked with L’Oréal Paris to raise awareness and promote the Stand Up training against street harassment. Our hidden camera project for the occasion exceeded 6 million organic views, and our creative proposal with a D inscribed on the hand is now used in most of their communications, including those led by Eva Longoria on the subject.

More recently, we have collaborated with Asics, Henkel, and SNCF. With SIG and the government, we co-created a campaign on gender-based violence in public transport, developing a digital platform, podcasts, and a guide distributed in stations to educate on the subject.