Peugeot Ad Gets the Green Light (and the Red One)

We’re always interested at System1 in ads that do something different and entertaining in the automotive category. Car ads can be a byword for the kind of dull, ineffective advertising we’re strongly against – ads with no distinctiveness, no strong use of brand assets and no character or emotion outside a slick parade of features.

So it’s a pleasure to celebrate a car ad which is none of those things. Peugeot’s new spot for its E-208 electric and hybrid range has launched around Europe – we tested it in Germany and the Netherlands. The slogan is “Cross Over To The Fun Side”, making it very clear up front that for once with a car campaign the priority is the fun and joy of driving.

To underline that idea Peugeot have come up with a beautifully simple creative concept. The small red and green figures on traffic lights are mostly content to simply watch every car go by, but the E-308 takes their fancy. They come to life, jump down from the traffic lights and go for a driving adventure in Peugeot’s car. We see a crew of red and green figures drive through the city, enjoy the E-308’s comforts and have a close encounter of the canine kind.

You might expect them to return to the traffic light at the end but no! Instead they hit the road and a punchline shot right at the end sees a crowd of baffled pedestrians looking up at the empty traffic light.

This kind of closing joke is an example of what we call a “peak end” – named after Daniel Kahneman’s rule of thumb that what people remember from an experience is the peak and the ending. If you make the ending entertaining and memorable, you’re on the right track. It’s rare to see car ads take advantage of the effect, and this is just one of the things Peugeot are getting right here.

The other big one is the decision to use the traffic light figures as the lead characters. In his book Look Out, Orlando Wood talks about how the most effective commercials are often arranged around the triad of “Character – Incident – Place”. In other words, a narrative built around someone doing something somewhere. By creating such charming animated characters from something we see every day, the ad has instant emotional appeal.

That’s proved by the results from Germany and the Netherlands. In Germany, where the average video ad scores only 2.4-Stars, “Cross Over To The Fun Side” got a 4.0-Star Rating. For a car ad, that’s an excellent result. The ad’s emotion and dynamism also pushed it to an Exceptional short-term Spike Rating too. In the Netherlands, it scored 3.8-Stars, again firmly above the national average, and got Strong scores in short-term Spike and in Brand Fluency.

The lesson for European car advertisers is a simple one – it’s fine to have fun! In fact, it’s more effective in both the short- and long-term to lean into entertainment in your campaigns. In such a product-centric category it can seem counter-intuitive to put the focus on anything else, but as Peugeot and their red and green traffic light men prove, it makes a car ad truly stand out.