Our challenge was to raise awareness of the Renault Mégane and position the car as ‘anti-bland’. Statistical research (towns with more Mégane had a higher fertility rate) pointed to a powerful thought: Mégane was a bringer of joy. More Mégane, more Joie de Vivre. And the most powerful way to promote this thought was to test it through a real experiment: could an English town with no Mégane embrace the French way of life and the car that epitomises it?We approached the experiment like a documentary and produced an entertaining eleven minute film about how a car changed a town. The fully integrated campaign including TV, press, online display, and PR generated £1.8 million of earned media, 417,873 unique microsite visitors and over 313,000 YouTube views.

This is the next generation of advertising. Not just making a bold claim, but taking a product truth and proving it on air with real people.

We approached The MÉGANE Experiment like a documentary, not a commercial. We sent one man (Claude) to Gisburn, Lancashire to spread the joie among the town’s inhabitants and filmed how they reacted to him and his MÉGANE. The resulting eleven minute film was completely unscripted and everything you see is genuine.

The film was hosted on the MÉGANE Experiment website along with interactive games, Facebook links, and a Joie map of the UK. Driving consumers to the microsite was a fully integrated media campaign (TV, press, online display and PR) designed to build as much noise as possible to help earn additional media coverage in news and entertainment programming. This is the next generation of advertising. Not just making a bold claim, but taking a product truth and proving it on air with real people in an entertaining, fascinating, and ultimately moving film about the transformation of a small town in Lancashire.

Overall the campaign generated £1.5 million* of earned media from a £50k budget (compared to £3.7 million of broadcast media spend) across the UK in TV, radio and press; and internationally (features appeared in publications as far afield as the Sydney Morning Herald and India Times).Reach was estimated to reach a potential audience of nearly 110 million**.A Google search for “French British” saw our story listed top at the campaign launch, with 40 related news stories.We generated 417,873 unique microsite visitors and 313,000 YouTube.Mégane market share increased 52% compared to 2009 and brand scores for “personality and character” increased from 11.9 to 19.4 at the campaign peak.In the latter stages of the campaign, a town-twinning proposal was put forward at the Gisburn Council meeting – to twin Gisburn with Claude’s hometown of Menton and the schools in both towns are entering into a formal partnership arrangement.

*value and reach of PR estimated by Precise Media (Oct 2010)