Puy du Fou: Emotion, Distinctiveness, and Creative Consistency for Greater Advertising Effectiveness.
Visiting a theme park is thrilling enough, but the real magic is in the memories you take away.
That’s the idea that France’s historical theme park Puy De Fou – the third most popular in the country – put at the centre of its current campaign. The creative platform was devised by the park alongside agency Hungry And Foolish, and it’s meant to capture the sense that the excitement of your visit lingers long after you leave.
A Bold and Creative Execution
The brand’s execution of that idea is highly creative. In both their 2023 campaign and this year’s follow-up, we’re taken inside a re-enactment of the action in one of Puy De Fou’s epic historical shows. The first ad brought to life a viking raid and the second a chariot race in a Roman arena. But then there’s a surreal twist, as a giant rubber duck interrupts the vikings, or a Roman racer is thrown through the air and just keeps going. It turns out we’re really in the imagination of a child after a trip to Puy De Fou, playing in the bath or in their car on the way home, inspired by the magic of their visit. It makes for a quirky pair of ads which conjure up both the unique excitement of the historical park itself and the emotions of a delighted visitor.
Strong Potential for Advertising Effectiveness.
What’s exciting about this campaign is that this year’s campaign outshines the original on all three of our main Test Your Ad measures:
- Star Rating (long-term brand building potential)
- Spike Rating (short-term impact)
- Brand Fluency (brand attribution)
It’s an example of across the table improvement that we think demonstrates the four profit multipliers in our new book, The Creative Dividend: Emotion, Distinctiveness, Showmanship and Consistency. Let’s look at how Puy De Fou harness each of those.
1. Emotion: The Foundation of Effectiveness
Emotional response is the foundation stone of effectiveness, both in the short and the long term. Dullness is a major opportunity cost for advertising, and The Creative Dividend explores how the least dull ads produce far more business effects than the most. For Puy De Fou, neutrality (the absence of emotion) is a low 35% against the French TV average of 43%. And the 2026 chariot race ad, in particular, drives a really high level of surprise, which pushes up the Star Rating to 3.3-Stars and makes the ad more memorable.
2. Distinctiveness: Recognizable Brand Attributes
The next profit multiplier is Distinctiveness – the deployment and use of Distinctive Brand Assets. You can see distinctiveness at work both in the specifics of the 2026 ad and also in the fact it builds on the previous 2023 campaign. The 2026 ad uses Puy De Fou’s most famous attraction, its epic Le Signe Du Triomphe chariot race, and also reuses the scenario of a historical scene turning out to be a child’s imagination. At System1 we call that a Fluent Scenario, a storyline that recurs and helps build expectation and familiarity.
3. Showmanship: Capturing Attention
Showmanship remains at the heart of the craft of advertising – gaining vital attention in a world full of competing distractions, by giving audiences something they’ve not seen before. Orlando Wood’s books Lemon and Look Out break down the most effective elements of showmanship. In Puy De Fou’s case the one we want to highlight is a strong sense of time and place. Rather than take the obvious route of showing a visit to the actual park, Puy De Fou grab attention by plunging us into Viking and Roman times, and our brains demand to understand more
4. Consistency: The Key to Long-Term Effectiveness
And finally there’s maybe the most important multiplier of all, Consistency. Brands who constantly switch ideas, platforms and campaigns in a search for novelty are doing themselves no favours. They’re missing out on a ‘creative dividend’ which begins to pay out over time as ideas bed in and become more familiar (and behind the scenes, working relationships grow). Here, Puy De Fou’s consistency is shown by returning to the original campaign idea with the same agency, and it pays off in the across-the-board improvement on our Test Your Ad measures.
A Multiplier Effect
Emotion, Distinctiveness, Showmanship and Consistency. These four profit multipliers don’t work alone. In fact, they form a creative stack, as our work with the Effies organisation proves. In the new Creative Dividend book we show how the stack works. An emotionally powerful ad that lacks distinctiveness, showmanship or consistency will still increase the chance of profitability (by 2.4 times according to our work). But include those other elements in the stack and the chance of your creative work driving profitability jumps to 12x. Like four horses pulling a Roman chariot in a Puy De Fou show, you might say.