Intermarché's wolf learns to cook in 'Unloved' — 600M views, Annecy Cristal

In France in late 2025, supermarket Christmas advertising had collapsed into a price war: discount messages, deal mechanics, performance media. Intermarché, a retailer whose long-term positioning is 'helping people eat better', faced the double bind that Christmas is exactly when people eat least healthily and when emotional space in retail advertising was most abandoned. Agency Romance and animation studio Illogic Studios set out to win the season not with prices but with a story people would share.

The creative idea was to package the brand message as a Christmas tale told from the point of view of the character with the worst diet in the canon: the Big Bad Wolf. Rather than featuring the brand or Christmas clichés, the team reinvented the fairy-tale villain as a sensitive outsider. The 2-minute-30 animation, in a graphic style evoking children's book illustrations, follows the wolf learning to cook healthy, balanced food — vegetables, fish, shared meals — as the way to be accepted by the forest community. Claude François's 1974 song 'Le Mal-Aimé' carried the film like a soundtrack.

Released on television in early December 2025 and amplified on social platforms, the film crossed the border between commercial and cultural object within days. HuffPost, citing AFP, reported more than 600 million views worldwide in its first week; the e-marketing.fr trade press counted over 20 million views on X and YouTube in the first days alone. Listeners multiplied streams of Claude François's song by four. Demand for an official wolf plush became so intense that Intermarché had to warn customers about fraudulent e-commerce sites selling counterfeit versions.

The work then ran through the industry's award circuit: the Cristal for a Commissioned Film at Annecy 2026, Best of Motion/Film Craft at the ADC 105th Annual Awards (a Gold Cube), selection at The One Show 2026 in Film & Video, and a Bronze Lion at Cannes Lions 2026. The campaign deliberately used no AI, in contrast to several 2025 Christmas ads, and was praised for putting craft and narrative back at the center of advertising.