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Perrier Takes Paris Underground With The Secret Place
The Secret Place is a digital campaign created for Perrier by Ogilvy Paris, published in France in November 2014, in which participants navigated an interactive film populated by 60 mysterious characters to find five hidden clues leading to a concealed Perrier bottle, with weekly winners receiving trips to five global destinations across a five-week sweepstakes.
The campaign lived primarily on SocietePerrier.com and across the Société Perrier and Perrier corporate Facebook pages, channelling users into an immersive participatory environment rather than a conventional broadcast advertisement. In France, where the campaign was published, digital engagement formats were becoming a core battleground for premium beverage brands seeking to hold younger consumers' attention beyond the television spot. The Secret Place met that brief by making the audience the protagonist, turning passive viewership into active investigation.
The mechanics were precise and theatrical in equal measure. Five clues were embedded within the interactive film experience, each one unlocking progress toward the hidden Perrier bottle. One winner was drawn each week over the five-week run, with prizes structured as travel experiences to five separate international destinations. The campaign ultimately reached 20 countries, according to research documented on Clapboard.com, giving a production conceived for the French market a footprint that extended well beyond its origin.
Perrier is owned by Nestlé through Nestlé Waters, as noted by Clapboard.com, and the brand had been developing a digitally led, sensory-forward creative direction with Ogilvy from roughly 2010 onward. The Secret Place represents a mature expression of that direction: a campaign that packages brand personality as an experience to be discovered rather than a message to be received. The Clapboard Score for The Secret Place is 63 out of 100.
Perrier entered the 2014 French digital campaign landscape carrying a deliberate creative identity built on intrigue, sensuality, and exclusivity. The strategic logic behind The Secret Place follows directly from that identity: rather than advertising a product attribute, the campaign manufactures a feeling — the sensation of being admitted somewhere others are not.
This approach reflects a broader shift in premium sparkling water marketing. The global bottled-water category was expanding rapidly at the time, with global bottled-water consumption exceeding 74.7 billion gallons in 2014 and growing more than six percent year over year, according to Canadian Grocer. Within that expanding market, the premium and sparkling segments faced intensifying competition from aggressively positioned challengers. In the United States market, Sparkling Ice volume in convenience stores rose approximately 240 percent in 2013, as reported by CSP Daily News, illustrating how quickly non-traditional competitors could capture volume from established players like Perrier.
In France, Perrier's home market and the geography where The Secret Place was published, the brand's primary competitive pressure came from fellow premium sparkling waters including San Pellegrino, also owned by Nestlé Waters, and Badoit, distributed by Danone. Rather than competing on product claims, Ogilvy Paris steered Perrier toward cultural cachet — positioning the brand not as a beverage but as an invitation into a world of Parisian intrigue. Chris Garbutt, chief creative officer at Ogilvy & Mather Paris at the time, stated that the goal was to let people experience something they would not normally live but had imagined, as reported by The Drum. That framing transforms the sweepstakes mechanic from a promotional device into a brand philosophy.
The five-destination prize structure reinforced the sense of elevated access, aligning the reward with the aspirational register of the brand and deepening the campaign's strategic coherence across its five-week run in France and its 20-country reach.
The Secret Place centres on a single creative conceit executed with considerable technical and narrative ambition. Ogilvy & Mather Paris constructed an interactive film world populated by 60 characters, each one a fragment of a larger secret party set in Paris, and embedded within that world a layered puzzle requiring genuine engagement to solve.
The decision to use 60 distinct characters rather than a linear narrative speaks to a specific creative philosophy. Each character represents a node in the experience — a surface that may or may not yield a clue — and the multiplicity creates the sensation of entering a living social world rather than watching a produced film. The Paris setting is not incidental. It anchors the campaign in the cultural geography most associated with Perrier's brand heritage, lending the digital environment a physical credibility that a generic or abstract setting would not have provided.
The Drum's coverage by Ishbel Macleod, published in April 2013 in relation to contemporaneous trade descriptions of the Perrier Secret Place concept tied to Perrier's 150th anniversary, described the digital experience as evoking a mysterious party unfolding among enigmatic characters in Paris. That description captures the tonal register Ogilvy Paris was working in: glamorous, slightly clandestine, and participatory in a way that flatters the user for engaging.
It is worth noting a documented timing discrepancy in the campaign's archive record. Clapboard.com identifies The Secret Place as a France campaign published in November 2014, while contemporaneous trade coverage describes a Perrier Secret Place launch in April 2013 connected to the brand's 150th anniversary. Whether these represent two phases of the same campaign or distinct activations, the creative DNA is consistent. The interactive film format, the clue-hunting mechanic, and the Parisian party world all reflect a unified creative vision from Ogilvy Paris. Production credits beyond the agency and creative leadership of Chris Garbutt are not fully documented in publicly available sources.
No verified performance data for The Secret Place is publicly available in the sources reviewed for this analysis. Audience reach figures, engagement rates, sweepstakes entry volumes, and post-campaign brand-tracking results have not been published in accessible trade or brand communications.
What can be assessed is the campaign's structural effectiveness. The Secret Place was built on a participation mechanic — clue-hunting across an interactive film — that inherently generates active, voluntary engagement rather than passive impression delivery. In the context of the French digital advertising environment of 2014, where banner fatigue was an acknowledged industry challenge, a campaign that required users to return across five weeks to progress through five clues represented a meaningful commitment of audience attention.
The 20-country reach documented by Clapboard.com suggests that Perrier and Ogilvy Paris designed the campaign with international amplification in mind from the outset, even though France was the primary published market. A digital experience hosted on SocietePerrier.com and distributed through Facebook's global infrastructure was inherently portable, and the travel-destination prizes reinforced the campaign's international register without requiring localised production.
The campaign's greatest structural strength is its alignment between mechanic and brand identity. Perrier's creative positioning under Ogilvy Paris — established through earlier work including the Perrier by Dita campaign, which aimed to make the brand appeal to younger consumers as noted by This Is Not Advertising — consistently prioritised experiential intrigue. The Secret Place operationalises that positioning as a game. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its concept with ambition and internal coherence, even as the absence of public metrics makes full effectiveness evaluation impossible.
The Secret Place was a digital campaign created by Ogilvy Paris for Perrier, published in France in November 2014. It featured an interactive film with 60 characters hiding five clues leading to a Perrier bottle, running as a five-week sweepstakes with travel prizes across five destinations and reaching 20 countries.
Ogilvy & Mather Paris created The Secret Place for Perrier. The campaign was published in France in November 2014, according to Clapboard.com, though trade press including The Drum also documented a related Perrier Secret Place activation in April 2013 connected to the brand's 150th anniversary. The creative director was Chris Garbutt.
Participants explored an interactive film populated by 60 mysterious characters set in Paris, searching for five hidden clues that led to a concealed Perrier bottle. The campaign ran for five weeks, selecting one winner per week and awarding trips to five international destinations, with the experience hosted on SocietePerrier.com and Perrier's Facebook pages.
The Secret Place was published in France as its primary market in November 2014 but reached 20 countries in total, according to Clapboard.com. The campaign was distributed through SocietePerrier.com and the Société Perrier and Perrier corporate Facebook pages, giving the France-originated digital experience an international footprint without requiring localised production.
Perrier's The Secret Place received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign that executes its interactive concept with ambition and brand coherence, though the absence of publicly verified performance metrics limits a full assessment of the campaign's measurable impact in France and its 20-country reach.
The Secret Place represents a mature phase of Perrier's digital creative direction developed with Ogilvy Paris from around 2010 onward. Earlier campaigns including Perrier by Dita, which featured Dita Von Teese and aimed to attract younger consumers, established a sensory and participatory brand register that The Secret Place extended into an interactive film and sweepstakes format.
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