In France Ads Aim at Heart, Not Wallet

This explains why television commercials started so late here — essentially because leftist opposition saw ads as corrupting the soul

But the government argued back in 1968 that commercials would help French companies and (this from the land of Descartes and Tocqueville) also further democracy, in that television had become a democratic medium. (Some 60 percent of French households owned TV sets by then.)

Before that, French stations broadcast only a few public-service spots carrying messages like “Change the tie, the tie will change you,” “Eat apples for beautiful teeth” and “Beans at your place” (to promote French legumes). Such earnest ditties yielded by the 1980s to what Amélie Gastaut, the curator of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs show, likened the other day to a Renaissance of French television advertising.

That decade was the Golden Age

American commercials go from the head to the wallet, British ones from the head to the heart, French, from the heart to the head.

难怪法国的广告这么经典！