Renault Rafale Sticks to the Road With a Dreamlike Aerial Film
Renault's "Stick to the Road" is a 2025 automotive film campaign created by Publicis Conseil, launched in France on April 18, 2025, spotlighting the Rafale's hyper hybrid E-Tech 4x4 300 hp powertrain through a gravity-defying cinematic narrative built around aerial imagery, four-wheel steering, and a French-language cover of a globally recognised pop song.
The Rafale stands as the flagship of the Renault lineup, available in two distinct powertrain configurations: the full hybrid E-Tech 200 hp self-charging variant and the plug-in hyper hybrid E-Tech 4x4 300 hp. It is the latter — combining permanent four-wheel drive, the 4Control advanced steering system, and a high-performance electric range — that sits at the centre of this campaign. Nearly a year after the Rafale's original launch, the decision to return the model to screens represents a deliberate second chapter in its brand narrative, deepening the vehicle's identity rather than simply reintroducing it.
In the French market, where automotive heritage and design ambition carry particular cultural weight, Renault has constructed a campaign that draws on the brand's own history. The film makes an explicit visual and conceptual reference to the Caudron Renault Rafale aircraft, linking the car's name to a lineage of speed and precision that precedes the automotive era itself. The world of the film tilts progressively as though the vehicle is preparing for takeoff, with external elements sliding away under the pull of gravity while the Rafale maintains its grip on the road — a direct demonstration of the 4x4 drivetrain and 4Control four-wheel steering that defines the hyper hybrid's character. Renault Global CMO Arnaud Belloni describes the creative logic plainly: the machine sticks to the road, it is agile, serene, and enduring, and all the film needed was an aerial soundtrack to match. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 71 out of 100.
Renault returns the Rafale to advertising in France at a moment when the SUV segment dominates passenger vehicle revenue globally. SUVs represent between 45 and 49 percent of global passenger-vehicle revenue in 2025, according to 6wresearch.com, and the Rafale's positioning as a premium, performance-oriented flagship places it in direct competition with segment leaders from Volkswagen Group and Toyota Group, both of which hold between 8 and 11 percent of directional global market share respectively, according to Fortune Business Insights. In the French domestic market, where Renault carries both commercial and symbolic national significance, reinforcing the Rafale's premium credentials is not merely a product objective — it is a brand-level statement.
The strategic decision to focus "Stick to the Road" on the hyper hybrid E-Tech 4x4 300 hp rather than the full hybrid E-Tech 200 hp reflects a clear insight: performance and electrification are no longer opposing propositions for French automotive consumers. By foregrounding the 4Control advanced four-wheel steering system and the permanently active 4x4 drivetrain, Publicis Conseil frames the Rafale not as a compromise between power and efficiency but as a vehicle where those qualities reinforce each other. The campaign's dreamlike, tilted-world aesthetic is not decorative — it is a physical demonstration of grip and agility made cinematic.
Publicis Conseil brings substantial institutional credibility to this brief. The agency has been recognised as Agency of the Year at Cannes Lions and ranked first in the WARC Creative 100 at agency level, as documented by France Publicisgroupe, establishing a creative standard that the Renault relationship has helped sustain across multiple campaigns including the 2022 Renault Clio "Born Clio, now Hybrid" work, per publicisconseil.fr. The long-running Renault partnership gives the agency a depth of brand literacy that is visible in how precisely the film's physical metaphor maps onto the Rafale's actual engineering.
Nicolas Perez Vega directs "Stick to the Road" for production company Iconoclast, bringing a background in large-scale visual construction to a brief that required the physical world itself to behave differently. The central creative conceit — a world that tilts progressively until the Rafale appears to rise above the clouds — demanded extensive pre-production planning, because the effect was designed to be achieved through practical staging rather than pure digital composition. Every element of the tilted environment, from sliding urban furniture to displaced pedestrians, was mapped and choreographed before a single frame was shot, according to the campaign documentation cited by Media Renault.
The creative team at Publicis Conseil assembled for this production includes Global CCO and CEO Marco Venturelli, Creative Director Marcelo Vergara, Copywriter Antoine Querolle, Art Director Clément Palouzier, and Agency Producer Sarah Bouadjera, with account leadership from Hugues Reboul and Grégoire Verdet. This depth of named creative accountability is consistent with the agency's broader culture of authorship, and it reflects the seriousness with which a flagship campaign for Renault's most premium product is treated within the Publicis Conseil structure.
The soundtrack is integral to the film's emotional architecture rather than supplementary to it. Tiphanie Doucet's French reinterpretation of Angus and Julia Stone's "Big Jet Plane" — rendered in French for the French market — operates on multiple levels simultaneously. It carries the aerial metaphor established visually, it gives the campaign an unexpected cultural register that sits between intimacy and spectacle, and it reinforces the explicit reference to the Caudron Renault Rafale aircraft that the brand's naming convention invokes. Renault Global CMO Arnaud Belloni identifies the track as the final piece that made the concept complete, describing it as unexpected and glamorous in equal measure.
The "Stick to the Road" campaign launched in France on April 18, 2025, and generated one specialist marketing feature from Branding-Gazette, dated April 23, 2025, as documented by clapboard.com. No independently verifiable coverage has emerged from Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious at the time of this writing, per clapboard.com. The YouTube asset associated with the campaign registered 2,198 views, 17 likes, and zero comments, as recorded by clapboard.com — metrics that indicate limited organic amplification in the campaign's early window.
These numbers do not diminish the structural ambition of the work. A campaign built around practical special effects, a bespoke music commission, and a filmmaker of Perez Vega's profile at Iconoclast represents a significant production investment, and the creative logic — using the physical behaviour of gravity to demonstrate the Rafale's 4x4 grip and 4Control steering — is both legible and differentiated. The Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100 reflects a production that executes its creative premise with clarity and craft, while the early distribution data suggests the campaign's reach in the French market has not yet matched the scale of its creative intent.
For a flagship vehicle reintroduction in France, where the Rafale carries the weight of Renault's premium ambitions, the structural effectiveness of the film rests on whether the aerial metaphor lands with consumers as viscerally as it does conceptually. The combination of the hyper hybrid E-Tech 4x4 300 hp's engineering story, the Caudron Renault Rafale heritage reference, and Tiphanie Doucet's vocal performance gives the campaign multiple points of emotional entry — a resilience that purely performance-metric campaigns rarely achieve.
"Stick to the Road" is a 2025 Renault campaign created by Publicis Conseil in France. It spotlights the Rafale hyper hybrid E-Tech 4x4 300 hp through a gravity-defying film directed by Nicolas Perez Vega, in which the world tilts as the Rafale demonstrates its 4Control steering and permanent four-wheel drive system.
Nicolas Perez Vega directed the film for production company Iconoclast. Perez Vega constructed a physically tilted world using meticulously pre-planned practical effects, making the Rafale appear to rise above the clouds while demonstrating its hyper hybrid E-Tech 4x4 300 hp drivetrain and 4Control four-wheel steering.
Tiphanie Doucet's French reinterpretation of "Big Jet Plane" provides the soundtrack. Renault Global CMO Arnaud Belloni described the choice as unexpected and glamorous, reinforcing the film's aerial metaphor and the campaign's reference to the historic Caudron Renault Rafale aircraft from which the car takes its name.
Publicis Conseil created the campaign. The Paris-based agency has a long-standing relationship with Renault, including the 2022 Clio "Born Clio, now Hybrid" campaign. Publicis Conseil has been named Agency of the Year at Cannes Lions and ranked first in the WARC Creative 100, according to france.publicisgroupe.com.
The Clapboard Score for "Stick to the Road" is 71 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative execution and a clear conceptual link between the Rafale's engineering — its hyper hybrid E-Tech 4x4 300 hp powertrain and 4Control steering — and the film's gravity-defying visual premise.
The Rafale car shares its name with the historic Caudron Renault Rafale aircraft, and the "Stick to the Road" film honours that lineage explicitly. The aerial imagery reinforces the vehicle's hyper hybrid E-Tech 4x4 performance identity while connecting Renault's automotive ambition to its broader heritage of speed and engineering precision.
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