Classic Brand, New Media: Puget Gets Social Video Right

Make creative your competitive edge; unlock insights and inspiration from 100,000+ ads, rooted in emotional response, to predict and improve your creative’s business impact. Access every Ad Of The Week in our Topical Ads categories.

How does a brand with 170 years of history adapt to the social media age? Very well, in the case of Puget olive oil. A staple of French kitchens since the 1850s, Puget has won awards and been recognized as France’s favorite olive oil brand. But even a classic brand needs to refresh itself and reach a new generation.

Puget’s “Puget, sel, poivre.” social video campaign does that by juxtaposing the brand with vibrant summer imagery of people and families relaxing, having fun, and enjoying good food and good company. The distinctive Puget bottle is everywhere in the ad but the focus is still firmly on the people and their happiness.

As the tagline suggests, the concept of the ad is to place Puget alongside salt and pepper at the heart of great food preparation. Olive oil is a condiment that’s just as important as those two, and Puget is the only brand of oil you need.

How well has this idea landed in the low-attention, hard-to-master world of social video? We ran the ad through our Test Your Ad Social platform, which provides predictive effectiveness measures for long- and short-term business impact alongside a range of diagnostics. Short-form social video is a tougher medium to use effectively than long-form TV or online video ads, and the long-term average for French social ads is a low 1.9-Stars on our 1- to 5-Star scale.

So it’s great news for Puget that their ad has scored 3-Stars for long-term effectiveness, placing it almost within the top 10% of all French social video ads. It also beats the social video norm on Brand Fluency – our measure of rapid and accurate recognition of the brand.

How has the ad scored so highly, and what makes it effective? We can find out by digging into the Test Your Ad Social diagnostic measures. The ad’s optimistic, upbeat tone and joyful Summer imagery have obviously landed well with the audience, as Key Associations for the ad include “fun” and “Summer” up there with food-related items. And there’s a striking increase for Happiness and drop for Neutrality over the social video average – the ad is making people feel more, and that makes them do more.

The ad’s other secret weapon is music. Puget have been using Dario Moreno’s “Tout L’Amour” for 30 years now, and that consistency has given the song a strong, distinctive link to the brand. It’s a swinging, slightly exotic soundtrack which mixes surprise and nostalgia, subtly emphasising Puget’s status as a brand with real heritage in France. The consistent use has cut through to audiences and become a big driver of recognition. When we asked about distinctive assets, more than half the viewers mentioned the song, making it the top brand asset at work in the commercial. Consistency pays.

Puget here balances the modern and the timeless, the emotional and the practical, in ways that make this ad one any heritage brand could learn from.