Fondation Anne de Gaulle Renames an Airport to Fight for Disability Inclusion
The Paris Anne de Gaulle campaign is a public service initiative in which Havas Paris temporarily renamed Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport to Paris-Anne de Gaulle from 3 to 10 December 2022, transforming every touchpoint of the traveller experience to raise awareness of mental disability inclusion in France and honour the Fondation Anne de Gaulle's 75-year legacy.
The Fondation Anne de Gaulle was established in 1945 by Charles and Yvonne de Gaulle in memory of their daughter Anne, who was born with Down syndrome. For nearly eight decades, the foundation has campaigned to make French society more inclusive for people with mental disabilities. Despite that sustained effort, the foundation identified a persistent gap: people with mental disabilities remain largely invisible in public life and are consistently excluded from mainstream spaces, including transport infrastructure. The campaign's objectives were threefold — to assert the foundation's pioneering leadership, to raise broad public awareness of its work, and to build a coalition of partners committed to changing how French society perceives and supports the mentally disabled.
In France, the campaign activated the most symbolically charged piece of infrastructure available: Charles de Gaulle Airport, an institution bearing the name of the very family that founded the organisation. The airport's Terminal 1 façade was rewritten in gigantic letters to read Anne de Gaulle. Every element of the traveller journey was redesigned to carry Anne's name — boarding passes, luggage tags, baggage carts, queue barriers, flight-information displays, audio announcements, advertising screens across all terminals, and road signage approaching the airport. The campaign launched in direct alignment with the International Day of Persons with Disabilities and the opening of Terminal 1, giving the initiative both civic momentum and news-cycle relevance. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 86 out of 100, reflecting its structural ambition, creative coherence, and measurable cultural impact.
According to unapei.org, 12 million people in France are officially recognised as living with a disability. That figure represents a significant share of the French population, yet as the foundation's brief acknowledged, the issue receives minimum media coverage and government commitments rarely translate into meaningful action. Havas Paris identified this gap between statistical scale and public visibility as the central strategic opportunity.
The strategy centred on leveraging two converging moments of attention: the annual International Day of Persons with Disabilities on 3 December and the opening of a new terminal at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport. Rather than producing a conventional awareness campaign — the default approach used by many disability-focused non-profits, including peer organisations such as the Fédération des APAJH and Autism Europe — Havas Paris proposed something with no precedent in the transport industry: a full, immersive renaming of a major international airport in service of a public cause. According to havas.com, this was the first-ever name change for a major international airport undertaken to defend a cause and support a foundation.
The strategic rationale was built on narrative inevitability. Charles de Gaulle Airport already bore the name of Anne's father. Renaming it Paris-Anne de Gaulle was not an arbitrary creative provocation but a historically grounded act that the media and public could understand immediately and emotionally. The ADP Group, which operates the airport, became a named partner, lending institutional credibility to the campaign and enabling the physical transformation of the airport's infrastructure. In France, where monument and institution carry significant cultural weight, the act of renaming the country's largest public infrastructure functioned as an argument, not merely a gesture. The strategy was designed to generate earned media at scale, making the foundation's mission impossible to ignore.
Stéphane Gaubert served as Chief Creative Officer at Havas Paris on the Paris Anne de Gaulle campaign. The execution he led was defined by total environmental commitment: the creative idea did not exist in a single film or a poster but in the complete transformation of a living infrastructure used by millions of travellers.
The most striking creative decision was the scale of the façade intervention. Anne de Gaulle's name appeared in monumental lettering across Terminal 1 of Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport, visible to arriving and departing passengers as well as road traffic approaching the airport. This was not a wrap or a temporary installation in a marginal space — it was the airport's primary identity surface, reclaimed for a disability inclusion message. Every subsequent touchpoint reinforced the same transformation: boarding passes printed with Anne's name, baggage tags redesigned, luggage carts rebranded, queue infrastructure relabelled, and every flight-information display and advertising screen across all terminals updated, according to Groupe ADP. Audio announcements throughout the airport also carried the renamed identity.
The creative logic was one of total immersion rather than interruption. A traveller moving through the airport from road approach to gate could not encounter a single moment where the normal airport identity reasserted itself. The campaign asked the public not to watch a message about disability inclusion but to inhabit one. This approach distinguished the work from conventional public service advertising, where a single executional surface — typically a film or a print advertisement — carries the full weight of the message. According to Stratégies, the campaign created media buzz by spotlighting both the Fondation Anne de Gaulle and the ADP Group simultaneously, lending the initiative a partnership character that amplified its institutional reach. Stéphane Gaubert reflected on the campaign's recognition, stating in Campaign Brief in August 2023: "Winning the New York Festivals Genius 100 Limitless Award is an amazing reward. I am so proud of my team, my agency and of course for the Anne de Gaulle Foundation."
The Paris Anne de Gaulle campaign generated more than 200 articles across 13 countries, according to havas.com. The campaign reached more than 50 million people, as reported by havas.com, and produced more than one million euros in earned-media value, per havas.com. These figures establish the campaign as one of the highest-performing public service initiatives to emerge from France in the 2022–2023 period, measured by organic coverage and geographic reach relative to its production scope.
At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2023, the campaign won the Grand Prix for Good — the festival's highest honour in the public service category — according to Yes I Cannes. In addition to the Grand Prix for Good, the campaign won Gold Lions in the Direct, Health and Wellness, and Outdoor categories, a Silver Lion in Media, and a Bronze Lion in Brand Experience and Activation, as reported by yesicannes.com and strategies.fr. This distribution of Lions across six categories signals that the jury evaluated the work not as a single-medium execution but as a fully integrated public utility campaign operating simultaneously across experience design, media strategy, outdoor communication, and brand activation.
The structural effectiveness of the campaign derives from its choice of venue and its completeness of execution. By selecting the largest public infrastructure in France as its medium, the Fondation Anne de Gaulle and Havas Paris ensured that the campaign's footprint was inseparable from an institution millions of people pass through each year. The transport industry context — an environment not traditionally associated with disability inclusion advocacy — amplified the dissonance between the cause's message and its setting, making the work memorable in a way that conventional awareness advertising rarely achieves. The Clapboard Score of 86 out of 100 reflects this rare combination of symbolic precision, operational ambition, and measurable cultural impact.
The Paris Anne de Gaulle campaign temporarily renamed Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport to Paris-Anne de Gaulle from 3 to 10 December 2022. Created by Havas Paris for the Fondation Anne de Gaulle, it coincided with the International Day of Persons with Disabilities and transformed every traveller touchpoint, from boarding passes to terminal façades, according to presse.groupeadp.fr.
Charles de Gaulle Airport bears the name of Anne de Gaulle's father, making it the most symbolically resonant infrastructure available. Havas Paris identified this historical lineage as the foundation for a narrative that the French public could understand immediately, transforming an institutional name into an argument for mental disability awareness, according to havas.com.
The campaign won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Good in 2023, the festival's highest public service honour. It also won Gold Lions in Direct, Health and Wellness, and Outdoor, a Silver Lion in Media, and a Bronze Lion in Brand Experience and Activation, according to yesicannes.com and strategies.fr.
The campaign reached more than 50 million people and generated more than 200 articles across 13 countries, according to havas.com. It also produced more than one million euros in earned-media value, as reported by havas.com, making it one of the most widely covered public service campaigns to originate in France in that period.
Stéphane Gaubert served as Chief Creative Officer at Havas Paris on the Paris Anne de Gaulle campaign. He commented on the campaign's recognition in Campaign Brief in August 2023, expressing pride in his team, his agency, and the Fondation Anne de Gaulle for the work's international impact and award success.
The Fondation Anne de Gaulle was established in 1945 by Charles and Yvonne de Gaulle to honour their daughter Anne, who was born with Down syndrome. Based in France, the foundation has spent nearly eight decades advocating for mental disability inclusion, working to change public perceptions and improve support systems for people with cognitive disabilities.
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