French ads

"Huh?" is likely to be your first reaction to seeing a really good French billboard--until you get the hang of what French advertising is all about. Take the current ad for Perrier mineral water, pictured above. Even I, now a veteran viewer of French ads, had a bit of a "huh" reaction the first time I saw it.

But paradoxically, that's just how publicists here want you to react. They want you to have to think about the ad in order to "get" it. Along the way, you'll notice the product. At its most direct, the French advertising angle is distinctly oblique. Quite a bit different from the mainstream American ad, which is in-your-face direct (although addies back home tell me that they're seeing more and more Euro-style ads in the US).

By the time I'd seen the new Perrier ad twice, I had caught the theme well enough to instantly "get" the second in this series, pictured below right. The "theme"--if that's not too strong a word--is that of a picture on a teeshirt interacting with the product in "real life". Stated in words, it seems really weak. But visually, it's strong...and amusing. And most of all, not irritating and not intrusive.


Being at once clever, amusing, and oblique seems to be the hallmark of the best French ads. Oh, sure, there are plenty of 'ordinary' ads out there which just blatantly state their case; they're the ones plastered on Metro walls, repetitively placed side by side in every station. And there are more explicitly sexy billboards for women's underwear--showing way more skin than admissable in the U.S.--than I'm sure in any other country in the world. But hey, there's a perfectly valid reason for that: there are more women's underwear stores in Paris--approximately one every two blocks--than anywhere else. But the billboards people actually talk about are the good ones--the oblique, amusing, and sublimely oh-so-French ones.

The city hall of Paris obviously has a very clever publicist. If you've followed my (in)famous series on the mayor's war on dog doodoo on the sidewalks of the City of Light, you may recall my descriptions of some of their past billboards. (Incidentally, the campaign seems to have been highly effective because--wonder of wonders--there's way less dog poop on the sidewalks these days. But a mystery remains: I never see anyone actually picking up after their dogs. I'm wondering cynically if, in order to appear to be successful, the mayor hasn't ordered extra battalions of sneaky pooper scoopers into our streets in the wee hours of the night.)

Anyway, back to the subject, which is the most recent ad campaign by the city, a series of billboards which agitates for the use of condoms for the prevention of AIDS. The first one of these I saw, I didn't get at all--partly because I wasn't familiar with the place mentioned in the ad: the Parc des Princes. Anyway, the ad showed a condom in a soccerball pattern of black and white. The caption was simply "Parc des Princes", and I, for one, didn't get it at first. I caught on as far as the shape being very phallic, but I didn't notice the little "nipple" at the top that clearly rendered it a condom.

The actual message--the AIDS info hotline--is in small type at the bottom, along with an interesting logo that I just noticed when preparing the image for this postcard. In the lower right hand corner, there's a round shape that proves on close inspection to be a rolled up, unused condom, with the words Paris Plaisirs--Paris Capotes circling around it. That translates to "Paris pleasures--Paris condoms," "capotes" being an affectionate slang term for condom that more properly means "little hat."



A slew of other ads followed in this series, each with a condom dressed up as a Paris landmark. Luxembourg Gardens--well known for its amusements for children--was represented by the helium balloon condoms at left. The Moulin Rouge was of course a red condom with the arms of a windmill attached to it. And the bustling Barbès neighborhood, anchored by the Tati department store with it's trademark pink-and-white houndstooth check façade, was a condom all decked out in--now you're getting it--pink-and-white houndstooth checks.

The practice of introducing one tantalizing, slightly puzzling ad, and then following with variations on the theme, is always coupled with what I'll just call the French ad, for short. But sometimes, the follow-ups don't live up to the promise of the first attention-getter.

The best example of this I missed taking a picture of--an omission I've kicked myself for ever since. The followup ad showed a chair with its legs inserted in 4 high-heeled shoes; the next one showed a kangaroo in high heels. But the first ad was the cleverest I've seen to date. It showed a dreamy, long-haired young man, with about 5 days worth of beard on his sensitive face, sitting nude, with one hairy leg folded under him and the other knee raised, so of course there was no "frontal nudity." He was wearing only one thing: a pair of very high spike heeled shoes. The shoe store's name, Etam, was in small letters on the lower right. The caption on all three of the ads? "No woman's body was exploited for this advertisement."

Share