Hasta La Creative!

Pulco, a French drink brand owned by Orangina Schweppes, is a default summer drink. (Because when else would you have a cool citrus-lemon beverage?) And amid an epic heatwave recently, it capitalized on that positioning with #LaParesseADuBon. Roughly translated to “Laziness can be good,” it encouraged people to relax and go slow—because what else is there to do when you see mirages while crossing the street?

Earlier this month, with help from agency Fred & Farid, it illustrated that premise by taking seven days to finish posting a single-line Facebook status update. The post unfolded word by word, and eventually read, “It’s too hot to work.”

And while it’s too late to watch it as it happened, you can see the painfully slow progression when you click on the post’s “Edited” button:

While it didn’t capture much attention outside the ad industry (which fawns over itself in France just as much as it does in the U.S.), this is a nice example of how creative can manipulate the mechanics of social platforms to produce something unique and playful—and which, in this case, loyally manifests the brand’s message.

It’s also a tribute to Pulco that it let an incomplete sentence stand for a week without freaking out. It doesn’t look like Pulco spends much, media buy wise, but the post scored at least twice as many likes as any number of its painstaking but minimalist image posts. It won’t win Lions or anything, but it’s evidence that while engagement might be low, the brand is willing to experiment and be a bit scrappy.

Seven days is apparently also a record for the longest amount of time it’s taken anyone, ever, to produce a single Facebook post (at least according to the agency and brand). Other examples of brands who’ve broken social media records, however contrived, can be found on RecordSetter.com’s Social Media World Records subsite.

If you’re a cleaning brand, you’d better have your house in order—which means making your social media feeds as spotless as possible. French brand Spontex has done just that on Twitter, with a whole feed of white space.

Actually, though, the brand somehow hid images in that white space, which you can discover by clicking on the tweets. (Try it on the embedded posts below.) A fun idea from ad agency Kids Love Jetlag in Paris.

pic.twitter.com/CWlR2DdDdY

— Spontex (@SpontexFrance) May 26, 2015

pic.twitter.com/FdM2i9t9RV

— Spontex (@SpontexFrance) May 26, 2015

pic.twitter.com/OFw22OlsQ3

— Spontex (@SpontexFrance) May 26, 2015

McDonald’s in France makes some of the most spare, striking outdoor ads anywhere. For the past couple of years, the OOH ads have shown just the menu items, with almost no branding at all—first in closeup photography, then with simple drawings of the products.

This summer, the brand, working with TBWA Paris, is evolving the campaign by adding emojis to the images. (Emojis are now a requirement of every ad campaign everywhere, by the way.) The product drawings are now made up, pointillist style, of tiny emojis—reflecting the emotion stirred by the products.

For example: The Big Mac is made up of hundreds of little thumbs-up signs; the fries are made from smiley faces; the sundae from musical notes; and the Happy Meal from heart symbols. (Those are the only four menu items highlighted this time. The Happy Meal is new to the campaign, while the Quarter Pounder, Filet-O-Fish and Chicken McNuggets have been dropped from the ads.)

McDonald’s says the “pictograms” campaign has “placed the brand at the heart of the pop culture.” Indeed, the marketer clearly believes the work is practically high fashion. This year’s campaign includes a McDonald’s collection at Colette, the Paris fashion and lifestyle store, consisting of six products bearing the campaign’s imagery—T-shirts, tote bags, scarves, iPhone cases, notebooks and postcards.

See the rest of the images below.

The outdoor ads:

 
The Colette collection: