"Le meilleur vrai réseau" or How Weird is French Advertising

It often arrives to me-- ok, I'll recommence and try to sound like a normal human being instead of a franglais-speaker who has a tortured relationship with both the French and English language. Thanks to the horizon-broadening experience of living abroad, I can now no longer start normal-sounding sentences or spell in French or English. But lingusitic confusion pales in comparison to cultural confusion. I usually find myself completely baffled by French advertising. This is due to the simple fact that it is completely baffling.

First of all, the most frequently advertised products on French TV are cheese and perfume. I'm not kidding. I've never seen so many cheese ads since moving here. Dairy products in general are well represented in French marketing. Yogurt, especially and there's this one freakishly weird ad-- I'll try to download it, since otherwise no one would believe me-- for dairy products in general the features little skeletons dancing around a giant cow whose udder explodes and bathes them in a fountain of milk to an aggressive club remix of Stayin' Alive and then one of them jumps on the cow and starts drinking the milk. It was actually kind of disturbing to watch. ads involving miniature skeletons, the BeeGees and cow udders are pretty unusual, you have to admit. This doesn't seem to scream Winning Marketing Formula to me...

I saw this other bizarro ad yesterday for the metro. So this seems odd, since the RATP owns all forms of public transportation in Paris, so they pretty much have a monopoly. Even Velib, the rent-a-bicycle service is affiliated to the RATP, I think. I mean their competition is what, taxis or people who decide to walk? Or not go out at all?

And this ad seems like it advertises a video game at first. You see a digital image of a man-- he has pixels and he comes in and out of focus, and he's walking around outside in the "real world". You see him marvel at the sky above, the heat of the sun on his skin, singing birds, etc. and he looks intently at the real people who pass by. Oh, how he longs to be a real boy, you can almost hear him say. Then you see him go down into the metro-- St. Lazare specifically, because we recognise that weird glass igloo/pyramid thing, and he puts his hand on the escalator railing and marvels at its feel beneath his hand. Then his train comes and the doors open and-- surprise!-- he's face-to-face with his human, flesh-and-blood alter ego. The ad ends here and then gives the tag line, RATP, the best real network. Or the best network that really exists. To explain, the word network in French can mean a transportation network or a communications network, like for wireless internet or your cell phone.

So, I find this a strange ad. It's kind of post-modern in the message, take the metro because it's real, it exists, unlike a computer network or a video game. I described it to my friend Josie, and she thought it was a mistake to stress the realism of the metro. It's true that often the tactile or sensory experience in metro stations is fairly unpleasant. In other words, you generally smell urine and vomit. Why didn't they just say, "the metro: come smell the vomit for yourself," Josie joked. Who knows, maybe this is the next ad campaign for the best real network that actually exists.