30 Millions d'Amis Foundation's 'We Are the Champions' uses Queen's anthem ironically to confront France's pet abandonment crisis.
ARCHIVE30 Millions d'Amis Foundation Turns a Queen Anthem Into an Indictment of Pet Abandonment
'We Are the Champions' is a 2019 public interest film campaign created by Altmann + Pacreau for the 30 Millions d'Amis Foundation in France, using Queen's iconic victory anthem as an ironic device to expose the country's endemic pet abandonment crisis ahead of the summer holiday season.
The 30 Millions d'Amis Foundation addresses animal welfare across France, and by June 2019 the scale of the problem it faced was stark. According to adsoftheworld.com, France held the position of European leader in pet abandonment, with an estimated 60,000 dogs and cats abandoned annually, a figure that swells dramatically during the summer months when holiday travel prompts owners to relinquish their animals. The campaign was deliberately timed to land ahead of that peak, as documented by selfstorming.com, placing the film in the public consciousness precisely when abandonment rates climb highest.
The central mechanic is built on a single, devastating inversion. Owners are shown cheerfully singing along to 'We Are the Champions' as they abandon their pets — leaving dogs tied to lampposts, cats shut out of closing car doors, animals deposited at roadsides — framing an act of cruelty as a moment of personal triumph. The irony is structural rather than decorative: the song's lyrics, written to celebrate collective victory, are repurposed to indict individual failure. This approach marked a conscious departure from the convention of sad-dog advertising that had long dominated the French public interest space, as noted by selfstorming.com. The campaign comprises a single film asset and was published in France in June 2019. Clapboard scores 'We Are the Champions' at 64 out of 100, recognising its strategic clarity and tonal originality within the public service category.
France leads Europe in pet abandonment. That statistic, cited by adsoftheworld.com, forms the strategic bedrock of the campaign and explains why the 30 Millions d'Amis Foundation and Altmann + Pacreau reached for disruption rather than convention in 2019.
The standard creative grammar of animal welfare advertising in France and across Europe has long relied on pathos: slow-motion footage of distressed animals, melancholic music, and direct emotional appeals designed to provoke guilt. Organisations including the Société Protectrice des Animaux and international bodies such as the RSPCA have historically leaned on this register. The problem, as the agency identified, is desensitisation. Repeated exposure to suffering reduces audience response over time, and the French public had seen decades of this format. Altmann + Pacreau's strategic pivot was to attack the self-image of the abandoner rather than the sympathies of the bystander — a meaningfully different psychological target.
The timing reinforces the strategy. According to selfstorming.com, approximately 60,000 abandonments occur during the summer holiday period in France, making June the most critical intervention window in the calendar year. Reaching potential abandoners at the moment of decision, before the school holidays begin, is a direct application of behavioural insight to media planning. The prior 2018 campaign by the Foundation, also developed by Altmann + Pacreau, reportedly reached 45 million views according to adsoftheworld.com, establishing that high-reach digital film was the right format for this audience. 'We Are the Champions' inherits that distribution logic and sharpens the creative proposition, using the Queen licensing — secured for a symbolic price rather than a standard commercial fee, as reported by selfstorming.com — to amplify cultural resonance without inflating production cost.
The film is directed by Megaforce through Iconoclast Paris, as documented by adsoftheworld.com. Megaforce — the directing collective known for high-concept, visually precise commercial work — brings a particular sensibility to the material: the scenes of abandonment are shot with the visual language of celebration rather than tragedy, which is precisely what makes them unsettling.
The production does not lean on handheld urgency or documentary roughness. Instead, each abandonment is staged with the compositional clarity of a lifestyle advertisement, bathing ordinary suburban and rural French settings in the kind of light that typically accompanies car commercials or holiday campaigns. The owners sing. They smile. They drive away. The pets watch them go. The contrast between the production's warmth and the subject's cruelty is not incidental — it is the argument. According to selfstorming.com, the campaign explicitly moved away from the sad-dog convention, and the directorial choices by Megaforce are the mechanism by which that distance is maintained.
Music is integral to the execution. The Queen track 'We Are the Champions', composed by Freddie Mercury, carries decades of cultural weight as an anthem of earned victory. Its deployment here is precise: the owners who sing it have not earned anything. They are, in the logic of the film, the opposite of champions. According to selfstorming.com, the rights to the song were secured for a symbolic price in principle, a detail that points to the Foundation's ability to attract cultural partners aligned with its mission. Separate market research notes that music credited to Ólafur Arnalds and his composition Erla's Waltz features in related Foundation output, per adsoftheworld.com, reflecting the organisation's consistent investment in scored sound design. Production credits beyond the director and production company are not fully publicly documented for this specific 2019 film.
ARCHIVENo independently verified performance data specific to the June 2019 'We Are the Champions' film is publicly available at the time of writing. What can be assessed is the structural effectiveness of the campaign and the directional benchmarks set by the Foundation's prior work.
According to adsoftheworld.com, a preceding 2018 campaign by the 30 Millions d'Amis Foundation, also created by Altmann + Pacreau, reportedly reached 45 million views, establishing a high baseline for the Foundation's digital film reach in France and beyond. 'We Are the Champions' inherits the same agency relationship, the same distribution logic, and a creative device — the Queen anthem — with measurably greater cultural recognition than most licensed music used in French public interest advertising. The campaign was reviewed by shots.net in June 2019, which described it as a clever new spot that spotlighted France's abandonment problem, representing independent editorial validation within the trade press.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness case rests on three reinforcing factors. First, the ironic inversion of a universally known anthem gives the film a share trigger that sad-animal content rarely generates. Second, the pre-summer timing in France aligns the intervention with the highest-risk behavioural window, as documented by selfstorming.com. Third, the Foundation's agency continuity with Altmann + Pacreau — in place since at least 2017 per adsoftheworld.com — suggests an accumulated understanding of the audience that compounds creative precision across each annual campaign cycle. Together these factors position 'We Are the Champions' as a strategically coherent escalation of the Foundation's ongoing anti-abandonment communications in France.
'We Are the Champions' is a 2019 public interest film campaign created by Altmann + Pacreau for the 30 Millions d'Amis Foundation in France. It uses Queen's victory anthem ironically, showing owners singing as they abandon pets, to confront France's status as Europe's leading country for pet abandonment ahead of the summer holiday season.
Altmann + Pacreau used the anthem to invert its meaning. The song celebrates triumph, but owners who abandon animals have earned nothing. According to selfstorming.com, the rights were secured for a symbolic price, and the cultural weight of the Queen track gave the campaign a share trigger that conventional sad-animal advertising in France rarely achieves.
The film was directed by Megaforce through Iconoclast Paris, as documented by adsoftheworld.com. Megaforce is a directing collective known for high-concept commercial work. Their approach stages each abandonment with warm, lifestyle-advertising visual language, making the cruelty more unsettling by contrast rather than foregrounding it with documentary distress.
France is Europe's leading country for pet abandonment, according to adsoftheworld.com. Approximately 60,000 dogs and cats are abandoned during the summer holiday period alone, as reported by selfstorming.com. The 30 Millions d'Amis Foundation timed the June 2019 campaign to reach potential abandoners at the precise moment of highest risk in the French calendar.
Altmann + Pacreau, the Paris agency co-founded by Olivier Altmann, created the campaign. The agency has held the 30 Millions d'Amis Foundation account since at least 2017, per adsoftheworld.com, replacing Buzzman, who led the Foundation's 2016 anti-abandonment work. This continuity has produced a consistent strategic focus across multiple annual campaigns in France.
Clapboard scores 'We Are the Champions' at 64 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strategic clarity and tonal originality — its ironic use of a Queen anthem marks a genuine departure from France's conventional sad-animal public interest advertising — balanced against the absence of independently verified post-campaign performance data in the public domain.
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