Did You Know Ryanair Used a Picture Of French President Sarkozy and Carla Bruni In An Ad Pushing Cheap Tickets. If ‘Yes’ Then Another Viral Marketing Success And A Paltry €60,000 Court Penalty Made It A Bargain

Philip M. Stone February 6, 2008

As if French President Nicolas Sarkozy didn’t have enough problems with huge falls in popularity because the French people believed he was spending too much time wooing Carla Bruni, whom he married Saturday, and not enough time on solving economic problems, then along came Irish cheap ticket airline Ryanair running an ad showing the couple with a bubble above Bruni’s picture reading, 'With Ryanair, my whole family can come to my wedding.'

Sarkozy sued for just €1 to prove the point that you can’t use the President’s face in an advertisement without permission, but Carla, a model who makes her living off publishing her looks, sued for €500,000 ($750,000) claiming loss of income—the money she claims she would have received if there was a proper professional contract in place to use her picture.

The lawsuit not only got huge publicity in France but throughout the world as media globally picked up on the story. Ryanair offered to settle for the €1 and also make a €5,000 ($7,500) contribution to a charity of the President’s choosing, but Carla wasn’t having any of that and on Tuesday a court ruled in her favor, not for €500,000 but for a much less substantial €60,000 ($90,000).

So, at the end of the day, for what the ad cost, plus the legal fees, plus Carla’s judgment, Ryanair got global word of mouth about its cheap tickets. No doubt the company’s executives are opening their miniature bottles to celebrate such a great deal.

France, of all European countries, has perhaps Europe’s tightest privacy laws, and there is no question using one’s likeness without permission in an advertisement, especially if one is a celebrity of one sort or another, is an invasion of privacy. Advertising agencies know this full well. Often they will ask to buy news pictures from international agencies for advertising purposes, but the license specifically states the pictures may not be used for advertising unless the subjects in the picture give their permission.

One would have expected the Paris court to come down hard in a message to others that such activities are not acceptable, but if France’s First Lady was worth only a €60,000 penalty then maybe it was well worth paying the court fine as a cheap way of getting a lot of publicity at a relatively cheap cost.

An indication that Ryanair -- a company known for not exactly throwing its money around -- also thinks it got away cheap is that the company not only accepted the court’s judgment but, “In the light of the extraordinary worldwide publicity generated by this single advert, we have instructed our lawyers to write to President Sarkozy’s office, offering to make a similar €60,000 payment to any French charity of President Sarkozy’s choice.”

That’s a different attitude to before the court’s ruling when the airline’s official line was, “Ryanair has no intention of giving in to threats from Ms. Bruni or to her ludicrous claims and we will vigorously oppose any claim for €500,000 from this lady who had engaged in one of the most open, publicized and internationally reported relationships in the world, in recent weeks.”

The secret to this ad’s success was that Sarkozy and Carla objected and went to court. That started a global news writing exercise for all the foreign correspondents and news agencies in Paris and their stories were used around the world.

Did you know about all of this? If Yes, then Ryanair certainly got its money’s worth and it shows the real power of viral marketing, which in this case is word-of-mouth of people voluntarily passing word of “Did you hear what happened in France with a Ryanair ad…”

The airline didn’t really fight the open and shut case in court except to say that Carla was asking for too much. It did try and argue that the President and his bride should be prepared to be used in such a way, something that in France will fall on deaf ears. As the airline’s commercial director for France, exclaimed ever-so-innocently, “We are surprised because if you look at the ad, the photo shows both of them in quite a positive light: they are smiling, we aren’t making them say anything stupid.” An airline spokesman in Dublin described it as “a humorous comment on a matter of great public interest.”

But the airline recognizes a winning marketing ploy when it sees one, so with the Sarkozy case settled it’s on to the Italian city of Naples which is currently embarrassing the European Union because its waste disposal collection system stopped a few months back because the trash fills were full and whenever the government proposed a new site nearby residents complained and blocked the site.. (There was even talk of sending some of it here to Geneva where the trash incinerator has spare capacity – no thank you very much!)

Anyway, Ryanair has pounced on that embarrassment and has run an ad showing piles of Naples trash bags with the tagline, “Pay the taxes! Not for waste but to escape”, the idea being to take one of 250,000 free flights on offer and the passenger pays just the airport tax.

Now, the fact that Ryanair doesn’t even fly from Naples (Rome would be the closest departure point) hasn’t stopped the airline taking advantage of an adversity which caused the head of tourism for the Naples area to declare, “The only rubbish (trash) to be escaped from is Ryanair’s advertising! I am disgusted by this exploitation by an airline which has never flown to Naples.”

Just the reaction Ryanair would have hoped for. No doubt the foreign news agencies and foreign correspondents in Rome have written about this “insult”, the story will make its way around the world, and Ryanair gets more free viral marketing publicity.  Where next?

The airline recently had its problems, too, in the UK where the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) didn’t appreciate an ad that ran last summer featuring a model  dressed as a school girl, wearing in a classroom a short skirt, bare midriff, tie, shirt, and knee-high socks. The headline above the picture read “Hottest” to promote a ticket campaign. ASA called the ad “irresponsible” because it linked “teenage girls with sexually provocative behavior and was irresponsible and likely to cause serious or widespread offence.”

To which the airline responded, “It is remarkable that a picture of a fully-clothed model is now claimed to cause ‘serious or widespread offence’ when many of the UK’s leading daily newspapers regularly run pictures of topless or partially-dressed females without causing any serious or widespread offence.

It got more far more newsprint on that exchange than it bought for the ad. The airline knows exactly what it is doing, it has worked so far, and it will need to work even better in the future -- the company warned this week that higher oil prices and a weaker UK economy could well hurt its 2008 business plan.