The Little Prince Returns for Citroën, Plus Škoda and More

Don’t do this to our heartstrings! Created for the Citroën DS in collaboration with Martin Krejci and Marcel Paris, “Little Prince” takes us by surprise. We don’t even want to talk about it, so just watch it. It helps to have read The Little Prince to fully appreciate the emotional payoff, which we perhaps longed for without knowing it. (Fun fact: The author, Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, was a pilot like the book’s protagonist. And like the protagonist, he just flew off and disappeared. His wreck was found 20 years ago, but the mystique still holds.)

Kicking things off: Co-op’s new brand platform, titled “Owned by You. Right by You,” asks: If you invented a business today, how would it work? The ad, by VCCP, artfully answers the question by providing a dreamy stream of decisions you’d perhaps imagine were logical when businesses are “publicly owned” (except they’re not). In doing so, it basically distinguishes what makes a co-op different from a normal business.

“In the Food for Love” conveys its whole vibe in the title, but we still weren’t prepared for it. Created by Rosa Paris for U.K. grocery chain Grand Frais, it makes strategic use of classic pop music to convey the deep sense of relationship shoppers feel … not to each other, but to the supermarket. Inexplicably, the work makes us miss Grey Poupon.

“Before taking the road, one must learn to share it.” Try telling that to anybody who drives in a city! Škoda and DDB Paris are trying to solve a problem: Since Covid, when the Mayor of Paris installed a whiplash-inducing number of bike lanes, the road’s become unlivable as tensions between cyclists and cars rise. Both think they own the road. Both are jerks in their own special way.

Škoda is a major Tour de France partner, so it’s got both these warring tribes in its DNA. The agency and brand worked with the French Cycling Federation to do a simple thing that may be ingenious, but we won’t know for another 10 years: To train future owners of the road, they created the first-ever children’s playmat that includes bike lanes. The mat comes in a game box that includes a toy car, a toy bike (with a cyclist, natch) and a booklet you can read to your child, who of course will not listen.