Quiet Please!

One of the side effects of the smoking ban in cafés and restaurants is that smokers feel compelled to go outside in the street to have their shoot fix. And what happens when they are outside altogether? They talk, laugh, chuckle... drop their cigarette ends on the ground and trigger much anger from the neighbors! The problem has become so important that the town hall had to react and launched a massive campaign. The photo I took shows one of the posters you can now find outside many places. It says "Outside, let's talk quietly" and the little shoeshine box on the left is, in fact, a portable ashtray that is provide for free to cafés and restaurants so that they can give them to their customers.

Garden at the opera!

It's a very unexpected scene that I came across a few days ago, as I was passing by the Paris Opera (well the one we call Le Palais Garnier) ; a real "forest" growing on the front steps! I searched the web to find out more and I discovered that this was a street marketing operation to promote a new perfume for men by Guerlain (have a look at their web site, you have to be patient but it's quite impressive). I'm talking quite impressive!

Save the Brits!

Even if it's improving, the French are generally not very good at foreign languages and at English in particular. That is why some companies that specialize in language training take advantage of this situation to sell their courses. One of them - Telelangue - is currently running this pretty funny ad campaign at the moment on Paris buses. It shows a "typical Englishman" (well, according to his tartan, this one is probably more Scottish than English...) with the following caption: "Stop massacring the Englishman" which, in French, also means "Stop massacring the English language". Funny.

Orangina turns green for one day

Last week, a friend of mine who publishes a site dedicated - among other things - to sustainable developement, alerted me that the soda brand Orangina (a famous orange juice soda in France) was about to organize a "Greenwashing" in some areas of Paris. Principle? Turn parking spaces into a little fake grass green spot (an idea that was apparently "stolen" from the park(ing) day movement). I had to see this... I chose to visit the one spot located on my favorite place in Paris: La Place des Victoires. Here you go. Nothing really extraordinary, but unusual enough to be worth a post on PDP ;)

Smart Ratatouille

Do you recognize this guy? I know you do... If you were in Paris at the moment you could see hundreds of him, all perched on the roof top of Smart cars. They had the clever idea to use these cute little cars to promote the DVDs of this cute little rat! And it works pretty well; people can't help turning their head when they see one of these cars coming, several newspapers wrote about the operation and the little rodent even made it - again - to the home page of PDP!! (Well, last time, was much less cute, was it?)

Democratie en France

Over the past few days I noticed that Paris was covered in these little posters and I really wondered what they were all about. Only today did I find out that they're intended to promote a film called "Démocratie en France" made by four American directors who wanted to picture the French democracy during the last elections. To be honest, I just saw the trailer, and I'm not really thrilled. Maybe, because I already saw thousands of after elections analysis and I don't need to see another one...

George who?

When it comes to home made coffee in Europe you can be sure that a Nespresso machine is not very far. Nespresso (a brand of Nestlé) is a huge success here: almost 1.5 million machines and 2,3 billion capsules sold and18% of the capsule machine market. All this success is due to the good quality of the coffee of course, but also the advertising campaign which stars George Clooney. From what I read though, Americans will never see this campaign as George refuses to "spoil" his image "at home"! Click here to see the television and movie theater version.

Smart car of the month...

It's been a while since I've shown a little Smart car on PDP. In Europe, a lot of them are used for advertising, like this one which is currently used to promote the release of the Jungle Book DVD. Why do people accept to have advertising on their car? For the money of course! Providing you drive at least 700 km per month (about 500 miles), each campaign can help you make between a 100 to 300 euros a month. BTW, I hear they are going to sell the Smart car in the US, I'm really eager to see if American drivers will go for such a small vehicle.!