Achampagne advert invites you to "take a walk on the red side", a computer promotion urges you to "think different", while mobile phone advertisers boast they are "connecting people". Nothing remarkable, except that these slogans are in the wrong language.
In France it is against the law to run adverts in the language of Shakespeare unless there is a same-sized translation in the language of Moliere. But English adds a veneer of trendiness or sophistication in France and helps advertisers to target young or educated audiences, advertising executives say.
From boardrooms to big city suburbs, French people who want to seem sophisticated or cool spice their language with English. France's advertising watchdogs say that of late, the law is more often honoured in the breach than the observance.
"There is very strong pressure from advertisers not to apply the law in a rigid way," Joseph Besnainou, director of the advertising industry's self regulatory body BVP, said. "It (using English in adverts) has been overdone . . . but advertising is just the mirror of society," says Jacques Seguela, Vice President of Havas Advertising and the guru of the French industry.
Piper-Heidsieck's champagne advert twisted the title of 1970s Lou Reed hit "Take a walk on the wild side" to associate bubbly with memories of carefree youth among today's forty-somethings, throwing in a reference to the brand's red-labelled bottle.
But it got criticised within the advertising industry for being too obscure to understand, and its slogan went flat when rendered in French as "Red is not the colour of innocence". It was the latest in a series of adverts that raised regulators' hackles for overusing English.
"French people are very attached to their language. They fear it'll lose ground to English," said Christophe Haquet, a lawyer at French broadcasting regulator CSA. Last year the CSA got tough for the first time, making six advertisers pull television campaigns using English because the translation was too small. But it softened up in November with a ruling that advertisers did not need to translate both text and voice from English into French.
"We're not totally insensitive. We're not asking for double translation (of both text and voice) and we accept that a translation can be a bit smaller . . . We're not too demanding," Haquet said.
Using an English slogan in advertising campaigns across the world was once the prerogative of the big global youth brands like Coke and Nike but the last few years have seen a new vogue among makers of must-have electronic gadgets to boost their image with an English catch-phrase.
French consumer electronics company Thomson Multimedia, for example, rolled out campaigns across Europe last year using a new slogan, "Look, Listen and Live", for products ranging from interactive television sets to portable cassette players - and irritated regulators in its native country.
Besnainou said Thomson had side-stepped the law because the slogan was a brand signature, something the law does not cover, but a Thomson executive denied this. Apple Computer France draped scaffolding on Paris' famous Louvre museum with gigantic posters depicting cultural figures like Picasso, carrying its slogan "Think different" in one corner. Besnainou said he found this "a little shocking".
But the current fad for English slogans will probably fade out, says Seguela, because the trend among the biggest advertisers is to give national arms of global campaigns a local flavour. They found the flaw of worldwide campaigns was that an all-American image did not go down well everywhere, he said. Language infractions account for almost a quarter of the BVP's complaints over TV spots but are only a tiny fraction of the total.
Freitag, 02. Februar 2001