Industry
Beverage (Alcohol)
Challenge
Advertising alcoholic beverages in France is a notoriously complex endeavour. Governed by the strict regulations of the Loi Évin, alcohol brands face severe limitations on how, where, and to whom they can market their products. To succeed, brands must be highly strategic, entirely contextual, and rigorously compliant with their messaging.
Results
By partnering with Vistar Media, La Mordue implemented a hyper-localised DOOH and mobile retargeting strategy that generated a massive 82/100 impact score, including a 41% uplift in purchase intent and a 38% increase in brand consideration.
Key Product
Demand-Side Platform (DSP), Creative Analysis, Retargeting Mobile
La Mordue's strategy
When the hard cider brand La Mordue wanted to establish itself as the definitive beverage of the summer, they needed a media strategy that could cut through the legislative red tape and capture consumer attention in a highly impactful way. Partnering with O’Connection and Vistar Media, La Mordue launched an innovative, data-driven programmatic digital out-of-home and mobile retargeting campaign designed to intercept consumers during the most decisive moments of their daily routines.
The challenge
The French beverage market is fiercely competitive, particularly as the summer season approaches and outdoor socialising peaks. La Mordue needed to carve out a distinct identity and disrupt the traditional beer and cider categories, competing directly against established industry giants.
The primary challenge was not only to build top-of-mind awareness within the confines of France's stringent Loi Évin, which heavily restricts how, where and to whom alcoholic beverages can be marketed, but to effectively transition that initial interest into mid-funnel consideration and lower-funnel purchase intent.
To maximise the impact of their media investment, La Mordue needed to establish a strong physical presence near key summer events and festivals to position the drink as a seasonal must-have. They also needed to ensure their creative assets were visually optimised to capture attention in fleeting, real-world environments while driving consumers directly to the point of sale.
The response
To achieve these ambitious objectives, Vistar Media and O'Connection developed a hyper-localised, omnichannel strategy spanning both outdoor and mobile environments. The campaign, which ran from late April to mid-July 2026, activated screens strictly within high-visibility zones across major French cities, including Paris, Toulouse, Lyon, Nantes and Bordeaux. Leveraging a vast network of premium publishers, such as JCDecaux, Cityz Media, Mediatransports, Giraudy, Turnadon, Orisha ADgency and DOOHYouLike the campaign delivered over five million impressions across outdoor urban panels, transit stations and convenience stores.
To amplify the impact of these physical placements, Vistar Media managed a sophisticated mobile retargeting layer via Adsquare. The technology captured the GPS coordinates of anonymised mobile devices whenever they entered a strict 50-metre radius of an active DOOH screen. While Vistar oversaw the holistic strategy, the mobile display campaign was operationally executed via the Blis demand-side platform (DSP). This mobile extension relied on precise geolocation targeting to reach consumers who had a high affinity for cider and had already been exposed to the DOOH panels. This ensured that the exact audience pool most likely to engage with La Mordue received a sequential mobile message immediately after walking past a billboard, effectively bridging the gap between physical awareness and digital engagement.
A standout element of this campaign was the rigorous creative analysis conducted to evaluate the visual assets post campaign. Utilising Neuron's AI advanced technology, the creatives were analysed using heat maps and fog maps to predict visual attention across key metrics. The primary outdoor creative featured a bold, disruptive hook, "BIÈRE ? CIDRE ? HARD CIDER", designed to immediately challenge consumer habits. The analysis found the in-context attention to be effective, noting that the bright blue and yellow colours successfully stood out in pedestrian streets and shopping centres. Similarly, brand attention scored "Effective" due to the central placement of the large bottle acting as a strong anchor point.
However, the AI engine highlighted that the campaign's legibility could still be improved. While the main headline presented strong contrast and large typography, the secondary text elements and the "Disponible au rayon cidre" ("Available in the cider aisle") callout lacked sufficient contrast for easy outdoor reading in bright conditions. To further optimise future campaigns, the visual analysis recommended adding a supplementary, undistorted brand logo higher up on the creative, simplifying background graphical details to lower cognitive load, and increasing the contrast behind text blocks to ensure immediate brand recognition before passersby look away.
The results
To measure the true impact of this strategic deployment, a comprehensive Brand Lift Study was conducted via Happydemics. The combination of precise point-of-interest targeting, mobile retargeting and contextually relevant creative execution delivered phenomenal results across every stage of the marketing funnel.
Overall, the campaign achieved a massive impact score of 82/100, significantly outperforming the standard benchmark for the Western European Food and Beverage sector.
Key campaign uplifts included:
- +41% surge in purchase intent: Successfully transforming the brand's clear "available in the cider aisle" messaging into definitive commercial intent.
- +38% uplift in brand consideration: Placing the campaign in the top five percent of market references.
- +26% uplift in brand preference: Driven by a bold, distinctive creative strategy.
- +24% uplift in brand familiarity: Solidifying La Mordue's presence in a saturated market
The campaign also yielded fascinating demographic insights. While the creative resonated across the board, brand preference absolutely exploded amongst the 45-54 age demographic, outperforming all other age groups and completely defying market expectations for a challenger hard cider brand.
Conclusion
While the bold creative strategy proved highly successful, the post-campaign analysis provided valuable optimisation insights for future DOOH activations. Key recommendations included increasing the dominance of the La Mordue logo to boost immediate brand attribution and simplifying the mandatory legal text to improve legibility for consumers on the move.
Ultimately, by pairing a hyper-localised pDOOH strategy with data-driven mobile retargeting, La Mordue successfully navigated France's strict regulatory landscape. The campaign fulfilled its primary objective by effectively intercepting consumers en route to summer festivals and outdoor events across the country, solidifying the brand as the ultimate refreshing choice for the season.