La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (17 page)

In a world of such complicated codes of manners and taste, consider the plight of the business that wants to seduce customers with advertising. French advertisers are freer than those in the United States to play with nudity and sexual seduction, which can feature in soaring billboards in public spaces. Secure in the knowledge that there is no face-to-face encounter with another person involved, French advertisers feel at liberty to promote fantasies, even those that dare to stretch the limits of taste. Since so many of the ads don’t mention price, they can be used to sell dreams. But even here, there are red lines. What can be shown, and what said? What will give offense, and what will please? When used in an advertisement, nudity must be fun; to be too obvious would be “violent.”

Ask French men and women of a certain age the advertisement they remember best and they are likely to say “Avenir,” which is both the name of a billboard advertising company and the French word for “future.” On Monday, August 31, 1981, an unidentified nineteen-year-old brunette with short hair, a big smile, and a wet body clad in a green bikini suddenly appeared on thousands of ten-foot-high billboards across France. Her message was both provocative and mysterious.

“On September 2,” she proclaimed, “I’m taking off my top.” Two days later, a new poster appeared. She had kept her promise. Not only that, but she made another that was even more daring: “On September 4, I’m taking off my bottom.” Indeed, right on schedule, she appeared totally naked, but she was posed with her back to the camera. This time the ad announced, “Avenir, the billboard company that keeps its promises.”

The ad both titillated and shocked. Newspapers took sides. The country’s advertising watchdog agency condemned it. A women’s group in Lille won a court order forcing the company to cover the model; a deputy in Parliament vowed to draft legislation for an advertising ban on “the abusive use of women’s bodies.”

In a way, though, it was the perfect French ad: it offered anticipation, amusement, and female nudity all for free. Because the actual target audience—potential buyers of space on billboards—was small, the great majority of viewers were not being asked to buy anything. The ad is so revered that in 2010, nearly thirty years later, the financial newspaper
Les Échos
touted it as a model advertisement.

To learn more, I went to two of the giants of French advertising, Maurice Lévy, the president of the Publicis group (the man who demonstrated to me the different styles of hand kissing), and Jacques Séguéla, the head of the competing firm Havas.

Lévy leaned forward in his chair and looked deep into my eyes when he spoke. We conversed in French, but when he moved briefly into English, he spoke with the old-style French accent of Yves Montand, not the flat, globalized, and Americanized accent of executives who have gone to business schools. He doesn’t look much like Montand, but the role he was playing was not so different from Montand’s character in the 1960 musical comedy
Let’s Make Love
, a billionaire who falls in love with Marilyn Monroe. Lévy’s only flaw is that he is aware of his power, so his seduction is not sufficiently hidden.

Lévy said that the French approach advertising in a radically different way from Americans. “Never forget that advertising in France is almost suspect,” he observed. “The majority of French people used to think that when a product was good it didn’t need advertising. That’s why we had to be more subtle and use seduction more often. The French approach is based on ‘seduction,’ not with its sexual connotations but
à la française
, which means you create an emotional bond rather than convince with rationalization.”

Sure, selling is the goal of advertising. But like any good seduction, the selling process can’t be seen. The best advertising makes consumers complicit in a process in which their senses are awakened; only then can the notion of a transaction be introduced. There is little hard sell in France based on lower prices and greater volume. In most cases, criticizing competitors is against the law, as are ads that directly compare two brands.

While Lévy talked as if time had no limits, Séguéla was fast-moving and fast-talking. He could have been American. He reduced the aesthetics of advertising to a formula he has used for years: the British are intellectual and go from the head straight to the heart; the Americans are pragmatic and fact-based and go from the head to the wallet; the French are emotional and sensual and go from the heart to the head.

“I am the Casanova who has the task of seducing the 3.5 billion women who are on this earth!” he told me.

“Three point five billion, not bad,” I said. “But it’s only women you seduce?”

“Of course,” he said. “Eighty percent of consumers are women. So the advertiser is a seducer of women.”

It was Séguéla who created the ad campaign for Carte Noire coffee that called it “A coffee named desire.” He explained, “In this coffee, we don’t say the aroma is the sweetest, or it’s the best, or it’s the least expensive, or it’s luxurious. We say simply it has imaginary value.”

When the French talk about bargains and saving money in their ads, they tend to fill the ads with American imagery. During the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, Alain Némarq, the chairman of Mauboussin, the prestige jewelry firm, made waves in the luxury world by slashing prices and asking other luxury goods makers to do the same. One of his print ad campaigns was a two-page color spread that offered customers a cash rebate if they bought an expensive enough piece of jewelry. The backdrop was a waving American flag, with the caption in English, “Yes we can!”

It’s more common to push products by evoking beauty, pleasure, and the promise of sex. Anne Saint Dreux, a writer and head of La Maison de la Pub, a research group that organizes events about the history of advertising, told an audience in Paris one evening how different American and French cultures are, citing the reaction to a presentation she had given in New York on French advertising style.

“Obviously, I had to show some footage in which the female body was a bit naked,” she said. “I was showing ads for yogurt and cars, and then all of a sudden I felt silence. The Americans were really shocked because while you have to undress women to sell soap, to do it to sell yogurt is a mortal sin. So tonight—since we are French—we’re not going to have the same discomfort.”

She then showed French film ads over the years that were bolder and more brazen than anything one would see in America: bump-and-grind music for an ice cream; the sound of a woman sighing for a vegetable oil; a mistress and a wife together for a French beer; the orgasmic cries of a woman for a racing car.

Even more daring than the artful anticipation of seduction is the blatant manipulation of the sex act in advertising. Subtlety can sometimes elude the French, as happened some time ago in a campy television advertisement for Perrier water. The fingers of a woman’s right hand, with nails painted red and a ring on her middle finger, slowly stroke the neck of a green, eight-ounce bottle of Perrier. Then both hands briefly caress the bottle, then just the right hand again. The neck of the bottle gets progressively longer until the cap turns and the fizzy water explodes into the air. Today, the ad campaign has its own web page at
www.lamainperrier.com
.
La main Perrier
means “the Perrier hand.”

Commercially, the Perrier ad was a failure. “It was closer to pornography than eroticism, because there was an erection,” said Séguéla. “Even though it was only a simulated erection, it was provocative. Female consumers had no desire to make a sacrilege of the erection. It was a marketing mistake to make this film. Publicity must astonish but not shock.”

That helps explain why Bruno Aveillan’s 1998 advertisement for the Paco Rabanne perfume XS is considered a classic. The opening seems straightforward: a couple bathed in golden light and embraced by a shiny flowing satin sheet is copulating in midair; her pearl necklace is torn from her neck; a bottle shatters. Their entwined bodies float as effortlessly as if they are weightless. The ad was a feat of engineering, filmed in a thirty-foot-deep basin of water with no bubbles in sight; the crew used oxygen tanks, but the actors had to hold their breath. The ad is considered a work of art.

The sex-sells-anything phenomenon applies to print as well. A naked woman, seen from behind, looking over her shoulder at the camera, sits on an invisible chair; the ad is for a chair exhibition. A photo showing the torsos of a man and a big-breasted woman embracing, he in leather, she in a clingy black dress, advertises a laundry detergent for dark colors.

Soon after I arrived in Paris, there was a battle of the
strings
in magazines and on giant public billboards. A billboard campaign for Sloggi showed two long-haired women from behind, dressed in
strings
(as thongs are called in France) and red boxing gloves, their posteriors buffed and shined, playfully menacing a smiling man in tight boxers as he defends himself. “Be sexy. Be Sloggi,” the caption read.

Not to be outdone, a Bolero lingerie ad campaign showed a young woman removing what appeared to be tight pants, revealing her
string
. Turning toward the camera, she announced: “I’m a virgin. Are you?” The manufacturer insisted that the ad was nothing but a clever play on words.
Vierge
is the French word for “virgin,” and it also refers to the astrological sign Virgo. The ad was for a line of astrologically signed, hologrammed
strings
. The model was wearing a “Virgo.”

Sometimes the ads that are considered the most artistic and clever strike me as a bit creepy. Chanel was particularly proud of its two-and-a-half-minute film,
Train de nuit
, starring the actress Audrey Tautou and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, one of France’s hottest film directors, to pitch Chanel No. 5.

Set to Billie Holiday’s “I’m a Fool to Want You,” it shows Tautou exchanging fraught looks with a drop-dead-handsome mystery man as they board the Orient Express and head to Istanbul. Apparently, he has smelled her perfume. As night falls, Mystery Man stands outside her compartment, and a strange look comes over Tautou’s face as she lies in bed in a nightgown. Is it terror? Longing? E.S.P.? Maybe I’ve taken too many overnight trains to bizarre places, but I had the feeling he was stalking her. When I asked Jacques Polge, Chanel’s chief perfumer, whether the ad seemed a bit frightening, he did not disagree. “Yes, yes, it’s true…,” he said. “The film has its qualities—and its defects.”

I asked Florence, my researcher, who had studied advertising for her master’s degree in communications, for her reaction. She shared my uneasiness but at the same time found the Chanel ad mesmerizing. “He sees her and smells her, and you can feel there is danger here,” Florence said. “Her scent stays behind even when he can no longer see her. She knows he’s on the other side of the door and feels his presence, his desire. The perfume is the link between them. It evokes a dark instinct in this man. He is a predator, but he is also under her spell. You almost believe it could happen—and almost want to try it just to see if it will.”

The goal of French advertising gives little importance to climax or resolution. “Rare is the woman who likes to be pressured,” said Lévy. “Women prefer that things move progressively. Advertising is a little like that. If you use pressure, most won’t like it. You have to lead, with the head, with the heart, with emotion so that you make yourself part of the life of your female consumers.”

Creating a connection to potential consumers and taking advantage of a certain distance from them at the same time is just what the Bibliothèque Nationale did in 2007–08 when promoting a most unusual exhibition: its vast, secret archive of erotic art. As part of a campaign to attract a broad public to the exhibit, the library and the Paris mass transit system, one of the show’s sponsors, constructed a teaser on the No. 10 Métro line. The platform of the Croix-Rouge station, near the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of the Left Bank, had been closed since World War II. Now, it was dressed up to look like the foyer of an underground bordello.

As the trains passed, slowing down around a curve but not stopping, black strips of curtain fluttered open. Commuters got a six-to-nine-second glimpse of erotic engravings lit in shocking pink. It was a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t experience, a “furtive flash of hallucination,” according to the artist who designed it, and the ultimate in X-rated subtlety. One of the loftiest, fustiest institutions in France connected with ordinary people over pleasure. The public responded. The erotica show was so popular that the wait to get in was more than an hour.