Jean & Montmarin: The craft of advertising

Graphis, Sep/Oct 2001 by Armangau, Laurence

The agency Jean & Montmarin resembles, not the popular "Little House on the Prairie" from our childhood, but rather the "little agency made out of wood, on an island west of Paris." Gerard Jean and Hubert de Montmarin take on the roles of "Ma" and "Pa," surrounded by a swarm of staff members whose untiring loyalty is unusual for the Paris ad scene. An atypical group since 1984, the agency is even more unusual in that Jean & Montmarin had so little chance of succeeding when the founders decided on a whim one day to create their own ad agency.

Back then, the tide in Parisian advertising circles was increasingly towards mergers and conglomerates. One after another, agencies had given up on working alone and sought out financial groupings-at the time, only two, Dassas and Business, remained independent. In spite of the trend, Jean and Montmarin stubbornly maintained that the only way they could succeed in the profession was to create an agency in their own image. And to do that, they would have to create it from scratch.

With no office and no budget, they landed their first client, Kiwi household products, from a private suite at the Royal Monceau Hotel. Jean, whose pepper-and-salt beard and sparkling eyes defy his small stature, explains that from the very beginning, they agreed on a single guideline in all matters: every decision-be it with respect to recruitment, competition, or budget options-was to be in the service of producing the best ads.

During the first few years, Jean & Montmarin searched for an identity. Budgets were being met, the work was good, but nothing groundshaking was happening to their reputation. In the mini universe of advertising, Jean & Montmarin was known above all for its short commercials in a rustic and family vein, dripping with motherly love for Herta-brand sausages. Herta, an industrialized meat manufacturer, was seeking to convey a more home-cooked image. The Jean & Montmarin ad campaign worked brilliantly, but garnered little attention for the agency's role and creativity.

Yet, this very same agency that would go on to create an unprecedented benchmark in French food-and-beverages advertisement with its campaign for Yop(lait) drinking yogurt in which the hero claims to have spit in his yogurt. Though the concept, on the face of it, is outrageous for any French advertiser, statistics show that the spirit of this ad earned the formerly unknown brand an astounding 80% of the market share. The campaign's initial cost came to 15 million Francs (2 million USD) which goes to show that a lack of money is no obstacle to coming up with good ideas.

Gradually, the agency began acquiring more and more clients who could afford to take bigger risks. Jean explains that the agency targets advertisers at a point in their development when advertisement has become crucial, at the moment that they most need a good campaign, because, "A good advertisement is 50% the agency's responsibility, but 50% the client's too." Which brings us to the crux of the problem in French advertising: the client.

To come up with a good publicity campaign, you have to convince the client that the only way to break through public indifference is by accentuating the unusual. Advertisers in France want to achieve a consensus among consumers, but, Jean insists, a good ad should not please everyone at once. The verdict on an ad campaign almost always relies on marketing tests, and anything too extreme automatically scores poorly. The more disturbing the creativity, the more surprising the punch line, and the more risks it takes, the less it scores. But this is also how you produce a hit.

So there you have it: 90% of French advertisers are obsessed with catering to the average. Sometimes, quite miraculously, a particularly strong and highly imaginative campaign does well. Take for instance, the commercial for Nomad cellular phones, with the first-ever transvestite role. Not only did the ad pass the marketing test with flying colors, but it went on to boost sales. Unfortunately, the idea finally did go down for the count because the client could not stomach the sexual-yet highly humorous-innuendos of the commercial that created a major controversy in the press. The account finally went to Young & Rubicam, they opted for a rather politically correct style. So much for provocation!

Despite the risks, Jean and his staff have regularly managed to produce interesting results on tricky budgets. Only recently, Jean teamed up with a deputy production director, Benoit Schmider, ten years his junior, inviting fresh discourse and a new point of view. The ad campaign for Corona beer is an excellent example of the agency's style of production: simple, vivid, aesthetic and highly acclaimed in a milieu open to the countless pitfalls of the 1991 Evin Law on alcohol advertising.* This law allows advertisements for liquor beverages only within strict rules. Strangely enough, this regulation, which promised to sound the death knell for creative advertising in the genre, in fact ended up boosting its dynamism.