Naturellement Bizarre « une nouvelle vie de boheme

Naturellement Bizarre

April 9, 2008 at 1:46 pm | In food |
Tags: advertising, bestiality, orangina, pin-up girls, weirdness

File this under “sincerely puzzling marketing campaigns”:

Mmm… nothing says thirst-quenching delight like a sexy… kangaroo? Gazelle? What is that monstrosity, anyway?

When I see something like this, I can’t help wondering if there’s some joke or pun or, I don’t know… meaning I’m missing thanks to my status as a cultural outsider. Actually, I thought I had this one figured out, since the first one of these ads I saw was this:

orangina octopus

*shudder*

Anyway, I figured the joke must be a play on “pulpeuse” because the French word for octopus is “poulpe”. Pretty witty, right? If weird. But this new kangaroo-gal has upset that idea, so now I think the point is just some vague, half-hearted sense that “naturallement” (naturally) might have something to do with wild animals, and “pulpeuse” can mean fleshy and, to some extent, sexy or luscious. Put those ideas together and you get… bestiality kitsch! Obviously.

I watched this ad in hopes that it might make things marginally clearer:

But I can’t say it did.

This is one of those times that I’d like to hypothesize some great Gallic genius at work that a foreigner simply couldn’t be expected to understand. But I suspect the ad agency was simply taking a page out of the skittles playbook:

Make your ad creepy and disturbing enough, and people will inevitably blog about it, garnering you a boatload of free publicity. Well played, ad man.

13 Comments »

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open-tentacled shoes?? good lord.

Comment by sandhya — April 9, 2008 #
LMAO.

Comment by lapetiteamericaine — April 9, 2008 #
Reminds me of that peta girls gone wild campaign with the udders. Ick.

Comment by mkb218 — April 9, 2008 #
You’re not missing anything cultural…
It has more to do with advertising doing too many drugs…

My roommate knows an advertiser (it didn’t take part in this campaign, but knows those who did) and he explains: “sexy sells, animals sell, so mixing the two sell…”
Yeah right…
So now I guess Orangina sales will skyrocket on the zoophile market.

Comment by David — April 9, 2008 #
until I watched the ad I thought it could be a she-jackal.

but post-ad I am befuddled.

Comment by maitresse — April 9, 2008 #
I’m just surprised there *is* a zoophilic market. Will wonders never cease.

Comment by lapetiteamericaine — April 9, 2008 #
My favorite part is when the bottles explode through the legs of all those beautiful zebras.

Soooo very… pulpy.

Comment by Meg — April 10, 2008 #
I’m glad you wrote about this. As I mentioned to you , I’m unable to stop pronouncing “Orangina” as a rhyme with “vagina” and then to see a gazelle in a two piece….I just get so confused and the Metro ride becomes uncomfortable.

Comment by Misplaced — April 11, 2008 #
We saw those all over Paris this past week. The sexy cactus puzzled yet attracted me; the penguin had the nicest gams. Still, the ads did not make me want to drink their product.

Comment by Jacques — April 12, 2008 #
Okay, now I gotta go check out the stems on the penguin. Boy, never thought I’d use that phrase again.

Comment by lapetiteamericaine — April 12, 2008 #
I noticed those ads too!

Does it have to do with the word “pulpeuse,” I wonder? Obviously meaning full of pulp, as Orangina is, but also pulpeuse meaning sexy, like les levres pulpeuses…

Comment by Polly-Vous Francais — April 16, 2008 #
oops - re-read your line in between the pics — you obviously got that part.

Comment by Polly-Vous Francais — April 16, 2008 #
“Okay, now I gotta go check out the stems on the penguin. Boy, never thought I’d use that phrase again.”

I want to know when you used it and in what context!

My god, Orangina gets weirder and weirder all the time. But the sexy riding of the girl animals on the orangina canons as well as the animal tarts getting sprayed with sticky citrus in the commercial?

That just doesn’t do it for me…

Comment by JChevais — April 20, 2008 #