BV! Media’s popular Montreal news portal Branchez-Vous.com is sporting a dynamic new look.
Branchez-Vous president Patrick Pierra says the redesigned website couldn’t have arrived at a better time.
‘It was overdue,’ he admits to MiC of the move to attract a younger demographic. ‘The site is entering its 15th year, and although we’ve undergone several evolutions, we felt it was important to have a more contemporary look.’
Pierra says that Branchez-Vous.com, a French-language portal that is part of the BV! Media family of websites that includes LeDevoir.com, AirCanadaVacations.com, Telegraph.co.uk, MarthaStewart.com and About.com, has also undergone a repositioning.
‘We wanted this positioned as a news-focused information portal to be on par with other newspaper websites that we consider to be our competition,’ he explains of the site that draws an average of 800,000 unique monthly visitors (ComScore).
‘Our target audience is adults 25-to-54 who are active, educated, high-income earners, and more than half our traffic comes during work hours because it’s a news-oriented site.’
Pierra also says that the upgrade not only provides better resolution due to technological advances, but provides more advertising opportunities as well.
‘For a really long time, we didn’t have advertising on our home page,’ he explains. ‘We gradually introduced both a leaderboard and a big box in the past few months, and now technology has made it easier to implement such vehicles as homepage takeovers and peel-overs, where you see a small tag on the upper right corner of your screen, click on it and it takes you to another page.’
Advertising on Branchez-Vous.com can be purchased in whole or in part, says Pierra.
‘The Branchez-Vous.com portal offers several choices,’ he explains. ‘The main part would be Branchez-Vous.com, which is news, tech, business and cars. Another strong property is Showbizz.net, which has not been redesigned yet, but covers entertainment.
‘In addition to standard advertising formats, we use double-deep boxes that are 600 x 300 pixels. We can have sponsorship by sections. We can co-develop sites with partners.’
Pierra is hoping that the site’s facelift and establishing a new BV! Media office in Toronto will result in a surge of advertising.
‘We believe in internet advertising,’ he says. ‘We use it as a mainstay of our promotional efforts.’
Promotion for the site will initially consist of a six-week contest ending in mid-March that offers visitors a trip to Quebec, and will be promoted through BV! Media’s extended network.
‘We focus more on the loyalty of our users so they come back more often,’ says Pierra. ‘We know we have a lot of occasional users and we want to have them return on a more regular basis so they keep us as their main news source.’
