France's Model President

As readers flicked through last week's issue of the French magazine L'Express, more than a few did double takes. The familiar portly figure peering out from a full-page ad for Brunswick Corp.'s Mercury outboard motors seemed strangely out of place.

It was President Georges Pompidou --in a year-old news photo taken off the coast of Brittany--seated in the stern of a small boat, right next to a 110-h.p. Mercury outboard. "It's for your safety, Mr. President," ran the message below. "We'd be telling tales if we claimed our only concern is your safety. It's important and even dear to us. But--and you'll understand--so is that of all the faithful users of our black engines."

Caught by surprise, Pompidou did not understand at all. He immediately petitioned the courts to force removal of the ad. The courts complied in time to strip the President's photo from the 150,000 copies of L'Express sold in the Paris area, but the order came too late to affect the 450,000 copies that had already been shipped outside the city; the ad stayed in them. Another magazine, Paris Match, which had also intended to carry the Mercury message, got the word from the court just before press time. Deleting the ad caused the magazine to be a day late, raising costs sharply.

"We don't understand what the fuss is about," insisted Marcel Witner, Mercury's international manager. "We did not say Pompidou owned the boat." Besides, he said, in what sounded like an afterthought, "it is not an unflattering picture." More important for Mercury, there was all that free publicity resulting from the fuss. Nor was the publicity lost on other advertisers. For example, officials of the Lacoste apparel-and-toiletries firm surely noticed that their trademark, a curve-tailed crocodile, was sewn onto Pompidou's sports shirt. Lacoste, at least, is French.

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