Eric Astorgue and Jean-Christophe Royer of BETC Paris pick their Desert Island Ads
Eric Astorgue and Jean-Christophe Royer are creative directors at BETC Paris. They have worked on award-winning campaigns for Canal+ including ‘The Bear,’ ‘The Closet’ and ‘Dads.’
Desert Island Ads
Usually, when ad people are asked to pick their all-time favourite work, they all kind of select the same English/American stuff. It makes sense as advertising was invented by English-speaking people and our references often come from the UK or the USA.
For example : The Guardian, Timberland, Ikea, The Independent, Nike, Volkswagen, Heinz, Crest, Harvey Nichols..you only need to read the names of the brands to know which work we are talking about.
That’s why as French people, we decided to offer a new take on the game and only bring ad campaigns by French directors to our desert island.
Let’s start with two of our best directors, Michel Gondry and Antoine Bardoux-Jacquet. Oddly enough, these two became successful outside France first.
Let’s not forget Quentin Dupieux.
This campaign from the nineties made us leave our sweet world of ads conceived for children and enter a new world of commercials made for grown-ups. At that time, we blindly believed that all Apple wanted was for us to be happy.
As Frenchmen, we have to include naked people in our selection, it’s the rule. Here is an ad for AIDS awareness by Yoann Lemoine before he became a successful musician under the Woodkid moniker.
We now want to mention Thierry Albert who, as a creative duo, first with Damien Bellon and then with Faustin Claverie, is one of the best French creative talents working abroad.
On a desert island, you have to bring some reading material, so we were thinking of Nicole Wisniak, with her ads shot by the best photographers in the world and all the Playstation campaigns created by Erik Vervroegen.
We tend to forget that the first prank videos were made in France.
Also, we wanted to include this one. Nothing French in it, but it is simply a most effective product demonstration.
Can we change our own rule and include work from Belgium ? After all, Belgium is close to us and they happen to also speak French. Take a look at Lionel Goldstein.
To conclude our selection, we wanted to bring someone along to our desert island, Tom Kunz. He is not French, but he is extremely talented.