French ad guru & Slovak president

Published December 17, 2002

PARIS: Down and out Socialist candidates in upcoming presidential elections wherever you are in the world, there’s a French communications adviser who’s quite likely to get you elected, no matter how far behind the polls say you are.

Jacques Seguela, a founder of the Euro RSCG advertising agency, one of the world’s largest, and the man who engineered the 1981 come-from-behind victory by Francois Mitterrand in France, says that if Slovenia’s new President Janez Drovneck got elected on Dec 8, it’s largely of his doing. A victory, adds Seguela, that now allows him to boast of an incredible record of sixteen victories in the 18 election campaigns where he’s served as communications adviser during the past quarter-century.

Seguela, who became a household word in France, and much of Europe, in 1981 for having designed the “Tranquil Force” campaign that allowed Francois Mitterrand to stage his surprise victory over incumbent Valery Giscard d’Estaing, also says that President Drovneck’s 57 per cent victory in the Slovenian presidential poll also allowed him to “make amends” for the catastrophic showing last Spring of his last PR client, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. Jospin, counselled by Seguela and a number of other principals of Euro RSCG — an agency that has a tendency to support and advise leftwing candidates like Drovneck — managed only a third- place showing in the first round of French presidential elections last April that resulted in a second-round faceoff between rightwing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen and incumbent President Jacques Chirac who went on to be easily re-elected by an 82-18 per cent score.

Indeed, Seguela says that if he decided to “go all out” to bring about the better-than-expected showing by Drovneck in the Dec 8 presidential election, it was because Drovneck, also until now the country’s prime minister, and a man known well by Seguela the past 10 years, “resembled very much Lionel Jospin, and this in his sense of rigour and his serious nature, so given the lessons of Prime Minister Jospin’s defeat, I was well prepared to not repeat the mistakes we made in advising Lionel Jospin last April.”

One of the focuses of Seguela’s campaign was Slovenian television, on which Drovneck made ample use of commercials, 30 in all were broadcast in a country where political advertising on TV is quite a novelty, notes Seguela.

Opinion

Editorial

Judiciary’s SOS
Updated 28 Mar, 2024

Judiciary’s SOS

The ball is now in CJP Isa’s court, and he will feel pressure to take action.
Data protection
28 Mar, 2024

Data protection

WHAT do we want? Data protection laws. When do we want them? Immediately. Without delay, if we are to prevent ...
Selling humans
28 Mar, 2024

Selling humans

HUMAN traders feed off economic distress; they peddle promises of a better life to the impoverished who, mired in...
New terror wave
Updated 27 Mar, 2024

New terror wave

The time has come for decisive government action against militancy.
Development costs
27 Mar, 2024

Development costs

A HEFTY escalation of 30pc in the cost of ongoing federal development schemes is one of the many decisions where the...
Aitchison controversy
Updated 27 Mar, 2024

Aitchison controversy

It is hoped that higher authorities realise that politics and nepotism have no place in schools.