ARCHIVEPulco Turns the Lemon Into a Year-Round Kitchen Staple
Pulco's 2024 integrated campaign 'Lemon here, Pulco everywhere' — created by TBWA\Paris and first broadcast in France in April 2024 — establishes a new brand platform built on the versatility of Pulco across cooking, drinking, and everyday culinary use, anchored by the French tagline 'Citron par-ci, Pulco par-tout.'
The campaign's central strategic objective is to deseasonalize Pulco consumption in France. As noted by Clapboard, Pulco has historically depended on peak summer demand, when lemonade-making drives the majority of purchase occasions. This platform aims to dismantle that seasonal ceiling by repositioning the brand not as a summer drink ingredient but as a permanent fixture of the French kitchen, present across roast chicken preparations, marinades, hot drinks, and fresh lemonade alike. The brand's own positioning, per Clapboard, now identifies Pulco as the lemonade expert meeting all squeezed-lemon needs throughout the year.
The integrated campaign runs across television, press, social media, and website activity from April through September 2024, according to lareclame.fr. Three television films anchor the campaign, supported by five press illustrations. The new brand signature — 'Lemon here, Pulco everywhere' — serves as the unifying element across all executions, reinforcing the idea of multipurpose use across every channel and format. The 2024 effort also introduces a product innovation: Pulco Citron Gingembre, a lemon-ginger variant, which expands the brand's recipe repertoire beyond its established citron core and signals a broader ambition to grow the Pulco range's year-round relevance in the French food and drink market.
ARCHIVEPulco enters this campaign with a clearly identified commercial problem. Summer represents a disproportionate share of lemon-juice consumption in France, and Pulco's sales have historically reflected that dependency, according to data cited by lareclame.fr in coverage of the brand's prior campaigns. The 2024 platform is a deliberate attempt to break that cycle by expanding the occasions on which French consumers consider Pulco relevant.
The strategic insight is rooted in recipe diversity. Rather than asking consumers to change their perception of Pulco through abstract brand messaging, TBWA\Paris built the entire creative platform around concrete culinary uses — roast chicken with Pulco, Pulco-marinated salmon, hot lemon-ginger Pulco, and fresh lemonade — effectively letting the recipes make the argument for year-round purchase. This approach mirrors broader trends in food and drink marketing, where utility-led brand communication increasingly outperforms pure lifestyle positioning. In Europe, which accounts for an estimated 22% of global lemon-juice sales according to businessresearchinsights.com, competition for shelf presence and consumer mindshare among squeezed-lemon products is intensifying. Pulco competes directly with private-label lemon-juice products found across major French retailers, as well as with brands such as Sicilia, which holds shelf space in the same cooking-lemon-juice category. The decision to deseasonalize positions Pulco not as a premium niche product but as a category leader with the breadth to justify year-round household presence. The 2024 campaign builds on a lineage of strategic ambition: a prior Pulco campaign in 2021 increased spontaneous brand awareness from 4% to 6% and recruited more than 500,000 younger households, according to effie.fr, establishing the credibility of the TBWA\Paris and Pulco partnership to shift consumer behaviour through advertising in the French market.
Hafid Benamar directs all three television films in the campaign. Benamar was recognised as Best Director of the year 2024, according to Clapboard, bringing a distinct comedic sensibility to the brand's established absurdist tone. The films are structured around simple dialogues built entirely from Pulco recipe references — a formal creative constraint that transforms product mentions into the narrative engine of each spot rather than interruptions of it. This is a precise continuation of the Pulco brand's characteristic voice: irreverent, clean, and rooted in the product rather than aspirational lifestyle imagery.
The press component is handled by illustrator Marie Assénat, whose work appears across five illustrations in a clean illustrative style consistent with previous Pulco campaigns, per Clapboard. Assénat places the Pulco bottle at the centre of each composition, making it a structural element of the recipe being depicted rather than a passive brand mark. The recipes featured — roast chicken with Pulco, fresh lemonade with Pulco Citron, hot lemon-ginger Pulco made with the new Pulco Citron Gingembre variant, and Pulco-marinated salmon — each appear as full culinary scenarios rather than product shots.
The broader creative team at TBWA\Paris includes executive creative directors Benjamin Marchal and Faustin Claverie, copywriter Léna Monceau, art director Julia Deshayes, creative producer Amer Zoghbi, and head of production Maxime Boiron, according to packshotmag.com and cbnews.fr. The integrated campaign extends across television, press, social media, and Pulco's website, with the consistent illustrative visual language ensuring tonal coherence across every format throughout the April-to-September 2024 campaign window in France.
Pulco's 2024 'Lemon here, Pulco everywhere' campaign earns a Clapboard Score of 67 out of 100, reflecting a well-constructed brand platform with clear strategic intent and distinctive creative execution, tempered by the inherent challenge of measuring deseasonalization effects within a single campaign cycle. No independent third-party performance data for this specific 2024 campaign is publicly available at the time of writing. Analysis of the campaign's structural effectiveness, however, points to several areas of genuine strength.
The creative constraint — dialogues built entirely from Pulco recipe references — is commercially intelligent. It embeds product utility into entertainment without requiring a separate message-delivery mechanism, reducing the cognitive distance between ad exposure and purchase consideration. The recipe diversity demonstrated across the three films and five press illustrations directly addresses the stated strategic goal of expanding usage occasions beyond summer in France. The introduction of Pulco Citron Gingembre as a 2024 product novelty, woven into the campaign creative, gives the platform commercial news value that purely brand-led advertising would lack.
The precedent set by the 2021 Pulco campaign — which delivered a 6.4% sales increase and recruited more than 500,000 younger French households, according to effie.fr — establishes a credible baseline against which the 2024 effort can be assessed. The 2024 platform operates at greater creative ambition and broader channel reach than its predecessor, suggesting the conditions for comparable or stronger commercial impact are present. The durability of this campaign's contribution to deseasonalizing Pulco in the French food and drink market will ultimately depend on sustained media investment beyond the initial April-to-September window.
Pulco's 'Lemon here, Pulco everywhere' is a 2024 integrated brand platform created by TBWA\Paris and launched in France in April 2024. It uses three television films and five press illustrations built around Pulco recipes to reposition the brand as a year-round culinary ingredient rather than a seasonal summer drink, supported by the tagline 'Citron par-ci, Pulco par-tout.'
Hafid Benamar directed all three television films in the 2024 Pulco campaign. Benamar was recognised as Best Director of the year 2024, according to Clapboard. His direction applies an absurdist comedic register to dialogues structured entirely around Pulco recipes, maintaining creative consistency with the brand's established tone in France.
The campaign features four distinct Pulco recipes across its films and illustrations. These are roast chicken with Pulco, fresh lemonade with Pulco Citron, hot lemon-ginger Pulco using the new Pulco Citron Gingembre variant, and Pulco-marinated salmon. Each recipe is presented as a complete culinary scenario, demonstrating the brand's year-round versatility across France.
Pulco's sales have historically depended on summer demand for lemon-based drinks in France, limiting growth potential across the rest of the year. The 2024 platform directly addresses this by showcasing diverse Pulco recipes suited to all seasons, building on a 2021 campaign that previously recruited more than 500,000 younger French households, according to effie.fr.
Illustrator Marie Assénat created all five press illustrations for the campaign, per Clapboard. Working in a clean illustrative style consistent with previous Pulco advertising, Assénat positions the Pulco bottle as a structural element within each recipe composition. Her work forms a visual throughline connecting the press component to the television films across the integrated campaign in France.
The Pulco 'Lemon here, Pulco everywhere' campaign receives a Clapboard Score of 67 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's clear strategic rationale and distinctive creative craft, including its recipe-based dialogue structure and the precedent of measurable commercial results from earlier Pulco and TBWA\Paris collaborations tracked by effie.fr in the French market.
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