Now that the dust has settled on arguably the best edition of the Tour de France in years, and an equally engaging Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, I wanted to highlight one of the best guerrilla marketing campaigns I’ve seen for a while.

The brand behind the campaign managed to get people talking across social media, with coverage in major publications in multiple languages, including Yahoo, A Bola and Cycling Weekly.

And the best bit is that it cost next to nothing.

This is the mysterious case of Laurent Gina.

Cardboard signs for riders at the Tour de France are nothing new, and can sometimes cause a huge amount of controversy. But they’re generally a much loved part of the sport, akin to the writing the we see on the roads spurring the riders on at any major race.

But when people saw signs dotted along the edge of the road for Laurent Gina, it provoked one question in particular.

Who is Laurent Gina?

One look at the start list told us everything we needed to know. There was no Laurent Gina taking part in Le Tour. There’s not even a professional cyclist called Laurent Gina.

So why were we seeing these signs?

It turns out that the fans were given these signs by Tour de France sponsors Orangina.

L’Orangina. Laurent Gina.

In February Orangina announced it would be sponsoring the next three editions of the Tour de France, with the aim to “conquer the taste buds of thirsty fans around the world”.

Part of this goal might also be to inspire cyclists to reach for an Orangina instead of a Coke when they reach a cafe mid-bonk, but this TV and social media friendly campaign aimed to pique the interest of those watching rather than riding.

And it worked.

Multinational coverage from cycling, sports and national publications, millions of views across social media, over 8000 Google searches in July and thousands of people talking about the brand, when it may otherwise have been lost amongst the sea of other sponsors.

As for the long term effects, beyond the increased brand recognition that this campaign will have gained, Orangina’s website has seen an 83% increase in referring domains since the start of July. While Domain Authority and organic traffic have remained steady, this influx of links will no doubt benefit Orangina’s SEO in the long run.

The best part is that all it cost Orangina will have been a few bits of cardboard and some sharpies. Plus presumably a few bottles to literally and metaphorically sweeten the deal for the fans that would be holding the signs.

In the marketing world, where we often see bigger as better and we’ve just come off the back of the marketing colossus that was the Barbie movie, it’s refreshing (yes, like Orangina) to see a really successful brand campaign that didn’t require a huge upfront cost and wasn’t hugely complicated to implement.

Allez Laurent Gina, he may not have been a rider but he definitely won the marketing Tour de France.

I would also like to give a special mention to LastMinute.com sponsoring the broom wagon. Very simple and very fitting for it to represent the time cut off for riders. Not that any of them who saw it will have shared that sentiment.

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