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PMU Bets on Collective Identity With Its 2021 Anthem Campaign
PMU's 'With PMU, we bet in unison' is a film campaign launched in France in June 2021, created by Paris-based agency Buzzman, that repositions the gambling brand as a facilitator of communal betting culture rather than a purely transactional wagering platform.
The campaign, internally titled 'PMU – The Anthem,' centres on a single unifying proposition: that betting with PMU is an experience shared across an entire community of participants. Where much gambling advertising emphasises individual gain or personal thrill, this creative strategy turns the act of placing a bet into a collective ritual. The film format serves that ambition directly, using the emotional and cinematic weight of the anthem genre to generate feelings of solidarity, mutual anticipation, and belonging among bettors in France. Clapboard Score for this campaign is 60 out of 100, reflecting a creatively coherent concept that stops short of full executional distinction.
PMU — Pari Mutuel Urbain — is France's dominant horse-race and sports-betting operator, operating under a regulated framework overseen by the Autorité Nationale des Jeux. The campaign arrived at a moment of accelerating competition across the French online gambling market, making its community-first positioning both timely and strategically deliberate. By framing collective participation as the brand's core value, Buzzman gave PMU a differentiated emotional territory that extends beyond any single race or sporting event. The campaign contains one media asset and was produced entirely in French, targeting domestic bettors across the French market.
PMU occupies a structurally distinct position in the French gambling market. Unlike pure-play online competitors, its identity is anchored in horse-race betting — a category with deep cultural roots in France but increasing pressure from sports-betting rivals.
The strategic context for 'With PMU, we bet in unison' is significant. France's online gambling gross gaming revenue reached approximately €2.2 billion in 2021, representing growth of roughly 29 percent versus 2020, according to the Autorité Nationale des Jeux. Online sports betting GGR specifically reached €1.35 billion in 2021, a rise of approximately 44 percent year on year, per the same regulator. France's total gambling stakes reached €43.2 billion in 2021, up 42 percent since online gambling was formally authorised in 2010, according to the Cour des comptes. Online gambling's share of total French gambling gross gaming revenue grew to 26 percent in 2021 from 15 percent in 2019, according to the Autorité Nationale des Jeux — a shift that concentrates competitive pressure precisely where PMU faces its sharpest challenges.
Winamax, Betclic, and Unibet represent the primary competitive set in France's online betting market, each investing heavily in performance marketing and promotional acquisition. Against these digitally native rivals, PMU's strategic choice to lead with emotional belonging rather than odds, promotions, or product features is a deliberate act of brand differentiation. The insight driving the campaign is rooted in a durable truth about social gambling behaviour: bettors derive meaning not only from winning but from participating in a shared event alongside others who care about the same outcome. Buzzman, under the creative leadership of president and executive creative director Georges Mohammed-Chérif and vice president Thomas Granger, translated that insight into the anthem framework — a format that inherently connotes collective voice, shared identity, and civic pride. The choice positions PMU's community as the product, not merely the audience.
Buzzman built the creative execution of 'With PMU, we bet in unison' around the formal conventions of the anthem film — a genre that trades on scale, emotional escalation, and the feeling of many voices becoming one.
The film format was selected deliberately. Anthems as an advertising genre carry an implicit promise of inclusivity: they declare that every member of the audience belongs to something larger than themselves. For a gambling brand operating in a regulated French market where promotional creativity is constrained, this genre offers a route to emotional resonance that transcends offer-led messaging. The campaign's single media asset concentrates that ambition into one cohesive statement rather than fragmenting across formats, a choice that reinforces the singular, declarative quality of the proposition itself.
The Buzzman creative team responsible for 'With PMU, we bet in unison' was led by Georges Mohammed-Chérif as president and executive creative director, with Thomas Granger serving as vice president, according to documented credits from the agency's prior PMU work as reported by shots.net and musebyclios.com. Julien Levilain and Julien Doucet are identified as creative directors at Buzzman with involvement in the agency's PMU account during this period. Théophile Geslain served as a Buzzman account executive working on PMU campaigns through September 2021, according to LinkedIn. The anthem's production is conducted entirely in French, grounding the creative in an explicitly national register — a further reinforcement of the collective, community-wide address that the campaign's strategic premise requires. Production credits specific to the 2021 anthem film beyond these personnel are not publicly documented at the level of director or production company.
This approach continues a lineage Buzzman and PMU established with 'The Calling' in April 2019, a 75-second cinematic film that transformed horse-race names into epic historical and cultural tableaux, as reported by shots.net. That campaign demonstrated the agency's appetite for using film to elevate PMU beyond the functional register of a betting operator, and 'With PMU, we bet in unison' extends that trajectory into the domain of collective identity.
No verified performance data for 'With PMU, we bet in unison' is publicly available. No campaign-specific metrics covering sales lift, betting-stakes increase, market-share change, brand awareness movement, return on advertising spend, or controlled brand studies have been published or independently reported. The campaign carries no indexed recognition from Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, based on available public records. No indexed reviews appear in Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious.
The archive record for the campaign reports 3,441 views, with no corresponding like count, comment count, engagement rate, or platform provenance available. No verifiable social media reaction data has been identified on Twitter/X, Reddit, LinkedIn, or YouTube.
Assessed on structural grounds, the campaign's effectiveness case rests on the coherence of its strategic premise rather than measurable outcomes. In a French online gambling market growing at the pace the Autorité Nationale des Jeux documented for 2021, a brand film that prioritises emotional belonging over promotional mechanics is a long-term equity investment. Its value accrues through repeated exposure and cultural presence, making single-campaign attribution difficult even under ideal measurement conditions. The anthem framework is structurally designed to build brand salience at scale — an appropriate tool for an incumbent operator defending share against performance-marketing-led challengers. The Clapboard Score of 60 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its concept with clarity and genuine strategic intent, while falling short of the creative distinctiveness that would make it a defining benchmark for the gambling category in France.
'With PMU, we bet in unison' is a film campaign launched in France in June 2021, created by Buzzman for gambling operator PMU. It uses the anthem genre to reframe betting as a communal, collective experience rather than an individual transaction, positioning PMU as the facilitator of a shared national betting culture.
Buzzman created the campaign for PMU in 2021. The Paris-based agency is credited with the creative work, with Georges Mohammed-Chérif serving as president and executive creative director and Thomas Granger as vice president. Julien Levilain and Julien Doucet are identified as creative directors on the PMU account during this period.
PMU used the campaign to differentiate emotionally from digital-native competitors including Winamax, Betclic, and Unibet. Rather than competing on promotions or odds, Buzzman anchored the brand in collective identity and shared anticipation — a strategic response to a French online gambling market the Autorité Nationale des Jeux recorded as growing rapidly in 2021.
The campaign carries no verified award recognition. No indexed entries or wins appear in the records of Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards based on publicly available information. No mainstream press reviews of the campaign have been identified in trade publications.
The Clapboard Score for 'With PMU, we bet in unison' is 60 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign with clear strategic intent and coherent creative execution that nonetheless falls short of the distinctive benchmarks that would position it as a defining work within the French gambling advertising category.
The 2021 anthem continues a creative lineage Buzzman established with 'The Calling' in April 2019, a cinematic 75-second film reported by shots.net that transformed horse-race names into epic historical scenes. Both campaigns use the film format to elevate PMU beyond functional betting-operator messaging into emotional and cultural territory.
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