Sarko and Bruni take Ryanair for €60k A French court has ordered Ryanair to pay Nicolas Sarkozy and missus Carla Bruni €60,001 in damages for the unauthorised use of a lovely snap of the couple in one of its cheap-fare ad campaigns. Ryanair ad featuring Sarko and Bruni The advert in question (see pic) showed a fragrant pre-nuptials Bruni mulling that with Ryanair …
Jeez, it's been what, one, two weeks ?
If only cases were as fast for us regular citizens.
I'm still happy they won, it'd have set a very bad precedent otherwise.
Ryanair play this game of "I didn't think it'd shock anyone", fine then, now foot the bill.
PS: I can't see the Paris Hilton angle, unless shes does girl-on-girl with C.B. ? Full name obfuscated for obvious reasons :p
I honestly don't know who to say is the most publicity-hungry and money fixated party here. I will say Ryanair, but only just a nose ahead of the Bruni & Sarkozy double act who do seem a bit determined to get their collective visage in every publication going. They make that Jordan doris look on the shy side.
But Ryanair cry wolf too much so they get an additional prize for cheek.
Paris. She loves the publicity even more.
... The two have significant rights in their faces/names, the case was a slam-dunk. Of course, it helps that the one party (albeit the one claiming less) is the country's president.
To add insult to injury, RyanAir has been ordered to run the verdict in the same newspapers that they ran the ads in.
I love it.
I don't know what advertising goes for in the UK, but over here, the equivalent of 60,000 euros is pretty darn cheap for advertising to start with. Add in all the publicity Ryanair has garnered from this and it sounds like a really good advertising "buy" to me!
Paris, because she's an expert at getting extra publicity for next to nothing.
Be Aware of a Paddy with his Dander Up ........ Goodness knows to where IT Navigates ITs Crafts and Skills...... Safe and Secure within Ye Olde Celtic Knowledge.
Is Monsier Sarkozy, Madame Bruni's Muse? Vive la Difference!
Ooops, a tad Teutonic Franglaise? VIVE LA DIFFERENCE! :-)
Justice French style ?
Looks like Ryanair got a real bad dose of a bad hair day from a very questionable singer who cannot sing phonetically period on the current samples provided but the value of the judgement is staged so that the legal appeal costs are ten times or more to fight then to pay , an interesting choice indeed given the quickie divorce and rushed wedding ?
Me thinks there is a stench of very rotten French fish in the air !
There is a small thing which has probably not been noticed by the Grauniad,
namely that the judgment that condemns Ryanair to pay 60001 € is called
a "référé". It is an accelerated procedure, which is used to indemnify the damage
caused to the Sarkozy-Bruni couple by the Ryanair advert in advance of the full
judgment. It leaves open the possibility of a later full judgment in which Ryanair
could be condemned to pay a more important sum. A second interesting thing
is that the French constitution makes the president the head (and the justice minister the vice-head) of the "Conseil Superieur de la Magistrature" (CSM) which is in charge of deciding which judges and prosecutors will get promoted. The CSM is also acting
as a disciplinary court for magistrates who have violated the ethics of their profession. It has been uncommon for French president to seek redress in courts for
misuse of their image, but in the 1970s the motorboat maker Mercury used a picture
of president Georges Pompidou in an advertisement in the news magazine "l'Express". The court prevented the issue of "l'Express" containing the ad from
being sold to the public until the ad was removed (this was done manually by
the owners of newsstands).
To finish, it is worthwhile to note that the franglais "le buzz" is making its way into the french legalese. One sentence in the judgment reads:
"...son appréciation ne peut que tenir compte de l’étendue de la campagne publicitaire: une publication le 28 janvier 2008 dans le journal Le Parisien d’une photographie placée dans un encart publicitaire occupant environ un quart de la page 9, un important effet de buzz, recherché par la défenderesse..."
not to mention the fact that as of saturday (or was it monday??), bruni now goes by the name sarkozy and her 60k in damages will seemingly be split with her (shorter) second half. so really the title should read...Sarko & Sarko take Ryanair for 30k each.
... does that mean that her upcoming album will be signed carla sarkozy ? skulls because they are pirates of modern french politics.
I wonder how much it would cost Ryanair to get two full articles about them in The Register, complete with advert space? Ok, not much, but: Now scale that up to everywhere that's produced a variety of articles on this one and the TV / Radio / Dead tree coverage as well. Also, for the cost of a small French advertising run, they got a large pan-European one thrown in. The beauty of the whole thing is that the only place any of this coverage is negative to them is in the sniffier parts of French society (who wouldn't be seen dead on anything other than Air France anyway).
60,001? They'd be winning if they'd had to shell ten times that. They should definately appeal though. It'll only cost 'em a little bit extra in legal fees and they should get another round of free publicity out of it.
Remember advertising 101: A good advert gets printed. A bad advert gets banned. A really great advert gets printed, complained about and then banned in a blaze of publicity. It's got so silly these days that certain agencies will quote the likely range of the fine up front as part of the campaign costs.
Ryan Air should run a series of these adverts... I mean, they are getting a €500,000 a shoot model, PLUS the president, for a very affordable €60,001... not to mention all the extra media coverage they get everywhere else.
I would like to see a "Ahhhh Bisto" style series of these ads.... and the Paris icon because she will occasionally pop into the adverts with "hilarious" consequences - one example being "Wheres Sarko??" - "He's all over Paris" *cue shocked/offended pic of a naughty looking Paris*
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