ARCHIVESchweppes Martian Encounter Brings a Slow Moment to Deep Space
How Schweppes Martian Encounter Reframes the Non-Alcoholic Drinks Category in 2025 Schweppes...
Perrier Goes Surreal With Five-Film VFX Series in France
Perrier's 2015 campaign — comprising five short films titled Mirror, Thirsty, Magician, Super and Astronaut — is a visually surreal, VFX-driven series created by Ogilvy & Mather Paris and published in France in April 2015, designed to attract younger consumers to the brand's premium sparkling-water positioning under the Extraordinaire Perrier platform.
The campaign arrives at a moment when Perrier faces a clearly defined brand challenge. As reported by En Brandmemory, the brand's existing consumer base skewed older, and the 2015 advertising effort represented a deliberate pivot toward audience rejuvenation. Rather than a single hero film, Ogilvy constructs five distinct narrative worlds — each titled after the central character or concept it depicts — allowing the brand to deliver variety and depth across a single campaign burst. Each film operates as a self-contained piece of entertainment while drawing from the same visual grammar: heightened reality, impossible scenarios and the unmistakable green bottle at the centre of a moment of transformation.
In France, the campaign lands within a sparkling-water category that Perrier dominates by a significant margin. According to bevindustry.com, Perrier held a twenty-one percent share of the French sparkling-water market as of November 2015, placing it well ahead of Badoit at thirteen-and-a-half percent. That market leadership does not insulate the brand from demographic drift, however, and the five-film format signals an ambition to earn cultural relevance beyond its established audience. The Extraordinaire Perrier platform, launched in 2015 according to en.brandmemory.fr, provides the strategic architecture within which Mirror, Thirsty, Magician, Super and Astronaut all operate — epic in scale, playful in tone, and rooted in the brand's long history of surrealist visual communication.
Perrier identifies younger consumers as its primary growth opportunity in 2015. The brand's challenge, as reported by en.brandmemory.fr, is not market share — with twenty-one percent of the French sparkling-water segment according to bevindustry.com, it leads the category — but rather the age profile of the people buying it. Perrier's existing loyalists trend older, and without meaningful recruitment among younger drinkers, that leadership position carries a structural vulnerability.
The Extraordinaire Perrier platform responds to this challenge by positioning the brand not as a commodity hydration choice but as an emblem of the spectacular and the unexpected. This strategic move aligns Perrier against competitors operating on more functional or naturalistic grounds. In the premium sparkling-water segment, Perrier's closest global rivals include San Pellegrino, owned by Nestlé Waters, and Evian, according to statista.com — both brands that lean into heritage, source purity or lifestyle aspiration without committing to Perrier's distinctly theatrical, surreal brand voice. By doubling down on the surreal rather than the serene, Perrier carves out a creative and strategic lane that neither San Pellegrino nor Evian occupies with the same commitment.
The global context reinforces the logic of investment in the category. According to bottledwater.org, global bottled-water volume reached approximately two hundred and thirty-three billion litres in 2015, slightly surpassing carbonated soft drinks for the first time. A 2015 Technavio forecast, as reported by globenewswire.com, projected global bottled-water revenue growth of approximately seven-point-four percent compound annual growth rate for the period 2014 to 2019. In France, where Perrier originates and where this campaign launches, the premium end of the sparkling-water market represents a fiercely contested space. Choosing cinematic, VFX-led storytelling — rather than price-driven or functional messaging — reflects a brand confident enough in its market position to compete on culture and imagination rather than product attributes alone.
The five films share a commitment to visual extravagance that sets them apart from conventional drinks advertising in France. Each title — Mirror, Thirsty, Magician, Super and Astronaut — signals the imaginative territory it explores, and each executes its concept through production values that deliberately evoke feature-film spectacle rather than conventional thirty-second advertising. The result is a body of work that sits closer to short-form cinema than to category norms.
Chris Garbutt, Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy France, describes the ambition directly. As documented by luerzersarchive.com, Garbutt characterises the challenge as producing an epic film with a script that could belong to a blockbuster, executed within the constraints of a brand campaign. That framing explains the creative choices throughout the series: oversized scenarios, elaborate VFX construction and a tonal register that leans into the fantastical without irony. The campaign's visual language carries clear precedents within Perrier's own history. As noted by More About Advertising in a June 2015 review, the series references the spirit of Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen — a comparison that speaks to the films' appetite for elaborate, handcrafted-feeling unreality — and one sequence featuring a lion draws a direct line back to the iconic 1990 Jean-Paul Goude advertisement for the brand, according to More About Advertising.
More About Advertising awards the campaign an eight out of ten on its creative scale, with reviewers praising Ogilvy Paris for what they describe as an extravagant Perrier execution and singling out a hot-air-balloon concept as particularly effective, per More About Advertising. The five-asset format amplifies the craft investment: rather than concentrating all visual ambition in a single film, the series distributes its spectacle across multiple pieces, giving the campaign sustained presence and variety. Production credits beyond Chris Garbutt's creative direction are not publicly documented in available sources, including no verified director, production company, post house or music composer attribution for the Mirror, Thirsty, Magician, Super and Astronaut series.
No verified performance data for the Mirror, Thirsty, Magician, Super and Astronaut campaign is publicly available. No view counts, earned media valuations, brand-lift studies or sales uplift figures attributable to this specific 2015 Perrier campaign appear in publicly accessible sources.
Structural analysis, however, points to several indicators of effectiveness. The five-film format — unusual in its volume for a single campaign burst — demonstrates both the scale of Ogilvy's creative commitment and the brand's willingness to invest in sustained storytelling rather than a single executional bet. Each film's standalone narrative logic means that individual pieces can be distributed and consumed independently, extending the campaign's reach across different audience touchpoints without requiring a viewer to engage with the full series. The cinematic VFX ambition, as recognised by More About Advertising's eight-out-of-ten critical rating in June 2015 and their characterisation of it as an extravagant execution, suggests the work achieves its stated intent of producing blockbuster-scale entertainment within a brand context, per More About Advertising.
The campaign's strategic objective — recruiting younger consumers in France under the Extraordinaire Perrier platform — is structurally well served by this creative approach. Surreal, VFX-led content circulates more naturally in digital environments where younger audiences spend time, and the five-title series gives the brand multiple entry points into that circulation. Whether measured conversion followed remains undocumented. Clapboard scores this campaign 63 out of 100, reflecting strong creative ambition and clear strategic rationale offset by the absence of verifiable performance outcomes and the limited public documentation of production craft.
The Perrier Mirror, Thirsty, Magician, Super and Astronaut campaign is a five-film VFX series created by Ogilvy & Mather Paris, published in France in April 2015. It forms part of the Extraordinaire Perrier platform and targets younger consumers through surreal, blockbuster-scale storytelling rooted in the brand's long tradition of visual spectacle.
Ogilvy & Mather Paris created the campaign for Perrier, published in France in April 2015. Chris Garbutt served as Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy France, as documented by luerzersarchive.com. No director, production company or post-house credits for the Mirror, Thirsty, Magician, Super and Astronaut series are publicly available in verified sources.
Perrier held twenty-one percent of the French sparkling-water market as of November 2015, according to bevindustry.com, placing it ahead of nearest competitor Badoit at thirteen-and-a-half percent. Despite this category leadership, the brand identified an ageing consumer base as a strategic vulnerability, which the 2015 campaign directly addresses.
More About Advertising awarded the campaign eight out of ten in a June 2015 review, praising Ogilvy Paris for an extravagant execution and singling out the hot-air-balloon concept as visually effective. The same review linked the films to Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and connected a lion sequence to Perrier's 1990 Jean-Paul Goude advertisement, per More About Advertising.
Clapboard scores the Perrier Mirror, Thirsty, Magician, Super and Astronaut campaign 63 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative ambition and a clear strategic rationale for reaching younger consumers in France, offset by the absence of publicly verified performance metrics and limited documentation of the production credits behind the five-film series.
The Extraordinaire Perrier platform launched in 2015, according to en.brandmemory.fr, and provided the strategic framework for Mirror, Thirsty, Magician, Super and Astronaut. Rather than introducing new brand positioning, the five films extend Perrier's established surreal and unexpected visual identity, using VFX-led cinematic storytelling to recruit younger French consumers into an existing brand world.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
