How we helped Ford launch the Puma Gen-E through padel with Jules Marie
4 Instagram Reels over 4 months. 1M+ views. The car lived in Jules’s week, not in a studio.
1M+cumulative views across 4 Instagram Reels
The results.
4 Instagram Reels in collab with @fordfrance, boosted with paid media. Urban, sporty audience.
The car kept showing up in Jules’s vlogs, Stories and daily content, well past the contracted Reels.
An athlete always on the road plus a compact electric SUV. Daily life, not a placement.
Challenge
Ford launched its Go Electric campaign in France to push the Puma Gen-E, its all-electric compact SUV. The target: a young, urban, sporty audience. Far from TV spots and parking-lot shots.
Ford and its agency Born Social (London) picked padel. To front the campaign in France they chose Jules Marie: former tennis pro (ATP 203), now France’s #1 padel creator online, with 140K+ YouTube subscribers and 94K on Instagram.
The brief: show the car in the real life of an athlete-creator. Training, road trips, tournaments. No studio, no voiceover, no staging. Filmed by Jules, posted on his channels.
What we did
We built 4 Instagram Reels spread over 4 months. Each one sits on a real moment in Jules’s week, in a format his audience already watches:
- Reel 1, the pickup. Jules gets the Puma Gen-E for the first time. First impressions, details, live reactions. Unboxing, applied to a car.
- Reel 2, padel road trip. Off to the P1500 in Lens with Clément (Le Chiquiteur). 215 km of driving on 417 km of range. The Gigabox takes all the kit, rackets included.
- Reel 3, P1000 day in Paris. Morning mobility routine, picking up friends one by one, a fast charge on the way. Competition pace in 30 seconds.
- Reel 4, day in the life. Breakfast, Apple CarPlay, club training, Spotify, hands-free WhatsApp. Padel in the morning, dinner at night.
Every Reel went out as an Instagram collab with @fordfrance and was cross-posted to TikTok. Ford put paid media behind 2 of the 4.
Over the 4 months the car also came back in Jules’s vlogs, Stories and tournament trips, well beyond the 4 contracted Reels. His followers watched him drive it week after week.
Results
- 1M+ combined views on the 4 Reels (organic + paid).
- 4 Instagram Reels in collab with @fordfrance over 4 months.
- TikTok cross-post on every video.
- Audience reached: urban, sporty, higher-income, 25-45. Ford’s core target for electric.
Why it worked
Right creator, right product. Jules is on the road every week: tournaments, training, trips with friends. Compact for Paris, enough range for regional tournaments, a Gigabox for rackets. The fit is obvious.
Native, not advertising. Each Reel tells a real day. The car is part of the scene, not the subject. People watch Jules’s day, not a Ford ad.
Duration. 4 months of presence, not a one-day shoot. Repetition does what one big-budget spot cannot.
Padel as a territory. Ford could have picked football, running or surf. Padel is the fastest-growing sport in France, and Jules is its most visible creator.
Watch on Instagram: Day in the Life with the Ford Puma Gen-E and P1000 day in Paris.
