Each week, I offer you a new video on a specific topic to help you better understand authentic French. If you want to practice speaking this topic and finally gain confidence in French, join my French conversation group Ohlala French Coffee. 

This week we're going to talk about advertising in my conversation group. I don't really like watching TV commercials, but there are some cult French commercials that have made a mark on the French.

What I like in some commercials are the puns they can have or the idiomatic expressions.

I propose today that we look together at some cult French commercials and that we analyze them together, especially the vocabulary and the expressions used.

 

First French advertisement:

Let's look at the first commercial. It is, I believe, the most cult French advertisement. It is a little old, it dates from 2001. That explains the poor quality of the image. 

So, here we find a child who eats all the chocoSui's in the family, they are chocolate desserts.

And to avoid being scolded, he blames his goldfish, Maurice. When his mother comes home, he pretends to be on the phone with the SPCA, that's the Society for the Protection of Animals. And he explains to his mother that Maurice, the goldfish to eat, eat all the chocoSui's. 

It's a very cute and funny ad.

From this advert has remained the cult phrase: "Tu pousses le bouchon un peu trop loin Maurice!". This means that Maurice is going too far, he is exaggerating.

This sentence is sometimes used by the French to laugh when, like Maurice, someone goes too far, exceeds the limits.

 

Second French advertisement:

The second ad is a bit more recent. Strangely enough, the cult ads that were popular were from the early 2000s, now it's harder to get original ads.

It's an ad for a phone company called Sosh.

And the funny thing about this commercial is that no one can say: “Je suis passé(e) chez Sosh”. 

We have the sequence of sounds S [s] and ch [H], which can be sometimes hard to pronounce.

This sentence has in fact become a tongue twister.

Try to say this sentence quickly at home : “Je suis passé(e) chez Sosh” and tell me in comments if you can do it.

 

Third French advertisement:

Let's look at the third ad:

In the third commercial, we have a little girl who at 10 o'clock in the morning gathers her whole family because she wants to eat knackis, which are little sausages.

Normally, we don't eat knackis for breakfast, but she likes it so much that the whole family agrees to eat it.

There is a slang expression at the beginning “T’es relou !”. Relou is the verlan of "lourd" which means annoying.

This is another advertisement that plays on the cute and innocent side of children.

Like the first advertisement, this expression is sometimes used again “Mais, t’avais dit qu’on f’rait des knackis” to show our disappointment while laughing of course.

 

Fourth French advertisement:

Another very popular and not so young advertisement, dating from 1998.

It's a commercial for Milka chocolates where a man discovers the secrets of chocolate making.

We do not have much dialogue here, but the sentence that the man will say will remain cult : Et la marmotte, elle met le chocolat dans le papier d'alu ! 

The marmot is the animal you see in the ad that actually puts the chocolate in the foil.

And when the man tells the woman in the supermarket what he saw, she doesn't believe him at all.

This sentence “Et la marmotte, elle met le chocolat dans le papier d'alu ! ” will become so cult and popular that it will become a real French expression.  

Indeed, this expression can be used in everyday life. It means that we don't believe what a person tells us. 

You realize the power of advertisements though, there are expressions that are now part of our language thanks to / because of advertisements. I don't know objectively if this is a good thing or not, tell me in comments what you think.

 

Fifth French ad :

The fifth one is a bit silly, but very funny.

So, this is an ad for a scratch game. A game that you scratch and thanks to which you can win money.

We have geese explaining to a pig how the scratch game works.

The geese tell the pig to scratch the dice. But, the pig understands that you have to scratch Dédé. Dédé, in fact, can be the nickname given to someone named André.

The pig will then try to scratch someone named Dédé instead of scratching dice. 

You can see that we play a lot of quirks coming from the French pronunciation. It also gives the French a hard time.

And we have one last pun at the end of this ad: Le jeu de l'oie, ça remplume bien.  It's a pun that refers to the feathers of the goose (une plume). And "remplumer" means to regain money after a loss of money. 

 

Je vous dis à bientôt pour de nouvelles aventures, en français bien sûr ! 🇫🇷