The sad truth about promo is that it is ephemeral. For a spot to break through today’s harried web of impermanence and stick in the collective consciousness awhile, it has to be better than wonderful – it has to be the perfect marriage of narrative and aesthetic, and it has to have a hook that grabs you with the grips of its own merits and not by shoving itself down your throat. Basically, it has to be like BETC’s famous spot for Canal+, “The Bear.”

Not even three years old, “The Bear” already feels like a legendary happening on the timeline of marketing lore. Upon emerging in 2012, it promptly went on to become, at least by one account, one of the most awarded spots in advertising history. But even if it weren’t so publicly lauded – as many great spots are not – it would still be the logical starting point for a consideration of BETC’s output and history. With its supreme command of tone, effortless humor and seamless merging of brand and storytelling, “The Bear” serves as a synthesis of the kind of work BETC does and has done for more than 20 years – a stretch of time that has seen the Paris-based agency grow to more than 750 employees and build a global clientele that includes McDonald’s, Disneyland Paris, Louis Vuitton, Peugeot and many more.

From a TV marketing perspective, “The Bear” also happens to be the capstone of a partnership remarkable for its duration and consistent quality of excellence: BETC and Canal+ have been working together for more than 15 years, and continue to create together some of the world’s most innovative campaigns.

“Canal+ and BETC have a very special relationship in the sense that, for both companies, creativity is the integral part of the business model,” said Stephane Xiberras, president and chief creative officer of BETC Paris. “Canal+’s communication has to be a reflection of the quality of their programming. And that means we’re obligated (which is good) to produce campaigns of outstanding quality.”

People have come and gone during BETC’s history, but Xiberras has been one constant after joining the company as a creative director in 1999.

The first major commercial he conceived for BETC was “Statue of Liberty” for Hollywood Chewing Gum. Shot with the style and pacing of a Godzilla movie, it saw America’s most famous landmark removing her clothes and stomping through the streets of New York, then swan diving into the Hudson River. Perhaps the only commercial ever to show the Statue of Liberty’s bare breasts, the spot “was the first time that I experimented with a recipe that I adore,” said Xiberras: “a total WTF scenario, but perfectly executed.”

But “perfectly executed” shock value alone isn’t enough to propel a creative director into the primary leadership position at one of Europe’s biggest agencies. Rather, time and again, Xiberras has overseen spots whose irresistibly irreverent charm (that “WTF moment”) manages to keep attention riveted to the brand, resulting in seamless combinations of form and function.

A self-described “huge gamer,” Xiberras is always trying “to reconcile two worlds, cinema and gaming, which are now more closely linked than ever.” Those elements have been particularly noticeable in BETC’s work for its television clients, where interactivity has proved to be “one of the interesting ways to bring my passions [of] advertising and video games together,” said Xiberras.

Nowhere was this clearer than in BETC’s 2010 campaign “I Kill a Friend,” an email-based game designed to drive engagement with younger viewers for the French crime channel 13ème Rue. Those who visited the game’s central website, ikillafriend.com (and more than 22 million did) could give said friend the chance to have their own personal 13ème Rue experience. More than 1 million people uploaded their friend’s photo and email, chose a hitman, and then sat back and cackled gleefully as the site auto-generated and sent off a movie-like crime sequence of the unwitting pal’s murderous demise. On the victim’s end, they could engage in a whodunit after watching the video, wherein they were given 60 seconds to solve the crime. If they solved their own murder, the offending sender would receive an email back depicting their arrest. The campaign was so successful, it was brought back for a second chapter in 2011. I Kill a Friend 2 featured gangs instead of hitmen, and new investigative features including DNA analysis, hands-on interrogation and false leads.

“Sometimes it’s technology that brings about a remarkable idea,” said Xiberras, “or sometimes it’s a change in the presentation… Our tastes may stay the same but we can be moved in a different way.”

Shortly after I Kill a Friend 2 was wrapped up, BETC addressed viewers’ tastes in a literal fashion for an integrated campaign it designed for French music channel MCM, which had decided to radically modernize by adding a series of new themes to its programming, including wrestling, horror, extreme sports and the Japanese animation style known as manga. To help promote these new offerings, BETC honed in on the channel’s core “geek” audience and in particular, its penchant for staying in and chowing down in front of the television. Teaming with Speed Rabbit Pizza, the No.1 pizza delivery company in France, BETC facilitated the creation of four new recipes inspired by MCM’s new programming, including Monster Truck (double the cheese, double the meat), Zombie Crush (a “load of bloody meat”) and Car Wash Girls (“hot spicy sauce and white cream”).

For four months starting in March 2012, MCM viewers could use the network’s website to order “the first pizza brand that tastes like TV programmes.”

But as innovative as the efforts for MCM and 13ème Rue were, BETC’s TV marketing efforts have always shone the brightest on Canal+.

With seemingly nowhere to go following “The Bear” that could top such resounding success, the agency in June took its most famous creation to another dimension entirely – the realm of interactivity. Its “Being the Bear” digital campaign brought everyone’s favorite floor mat of an animal back, but this time had the audacity to avoid showing the testy creature at all. Instead, the online experience, as its title suggests, let the viewer walk in the bear’s shoes, standing behind the camera and “directing” the same scene over and over again, but changing up the genre each time to reflect the different kind of offerings available on Canal+. Here, the human performers from the original spot – along with a hilariously passive-aggressive assistant director character – got to be in the spotlight, as they flawlessly pulled off every kind of cinematic trope imaginable.

The results are innovative and ambitious, but they also compel the viewer to engage with the Canal+ brand with a kind of hands-on directness that was unthinkable when Xiberras first entered the marketing world as a copywriter in the ‘90s. The trajectory of “The Bear” to “Being the Bear” isn’t just an example of how to keep a great campaign relevant to the changing times, but is a testament to Xiberras’ restless, searching creativity, resolute focus on immaculate execution, and the ways in which those elements have permeated the agency. For Xiberras himself, however, it all comes back to something much simpler.

“I have a lot of energy,” he said, “and, I think, a certain ability for convincing others. That helps enormously in advertising.”

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