Europe's Best Work, Featuring Sacrée Brioche and Horrifying Robot Dogs

Hotel chain Accor, a premium partner for the Olympics and Paralympics, released an ad—or rather, a vibe?—just in time for the Games. It’s enlivening work by Havas Play, featuring a Sempéish concierge dashing through Paris while balancing an ice cream cone intended for a Very Important Client. The style is meant to recall Olympic sports, but it also recalls another (very Parisian) competition.

For petcare brand Musti Group, Erma&Reinikainen made a robot dog that looks amazingly like a real pooch, and that simulates the effects of heat stroke as the temperature rises inside a car. This is to scare people into not leaving dogs in their vehicles under the hot sun. The morbid operation is touring Finland, stopping wherever such offenses may occur. In supermarket parking lots, say.

With help from DDB France, Volkswagen celebrates 50 years of its Golf with a nostalgic ad set to Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).” We see Golfs evolve alongside the lifeline of a woman who grows up through the ’60s, passing on her affinity for the vehicle to her progeny. The work ends with her daughter, now a woman, asking an in-car AI assistant how she can “cheer her parents up.” (We can answer without ChatGPT: Keep your eyes on the road, kid!)

Abetted by agency Heaven, Motorola France goes full AI in “Styled With Moto,” a promotion for the Razr50, which uses AI technology for its camera and as a smartphone assistant. The result is very stylish. We tried not to count fingers.

We’ll wrap with some good old cultural pokery. In the first-ever campaign for French bakery brand St. Pierre, proffering goods in the United Kingdom, a French woman is seen freaking out, Jesus-in-the-temple style, after watching a weirdly pornographic video of a British guy squirting ketchup onto a St. Pierre brioche bun. “Eat avec respect!” the ad admonishes in cartoony Franglais. Work by Fold7.