When You See Your Own Work in the Paris Metro

The lifecycle of a running shoe ad: from conception to execution to unexpected desecration

William Sidnam
6 min readApr 16, 2023
A print ad in the tunnel of the Paris metro. It features four photos — three showing runners, one showing a twentieth-century apartment building
An ad for a Salomon pop-up store. Photo by William Sidnam.

One of the funny things about working in advertising is that your work is highly public. As ads are designed to be seen by as many people as possible, they’re displayed in places that can gain them maximum visibility.

What this means, in practice, is that if you’re making an ad, you better do a good job. If you make a mistake, everyone will see it. It’s one thing to get egg on your face; quite another to show off your eggy mug to the world.

It also means that from time to time, you may come across your work in the wild.

Last month, I was surprised and delighted to find an ad I had worked on in the Paris metro. It was a print promoting a pop-up running shoe store for the French sportswear brand Salomon.

Well, I should clarify that I hadn’t worked on this particular execution per se. Rather, I had worked on two ad campaigns for Salomon running shoes, and photos shot during these campaigns — otherwise known as ‘assets’ — had then been used on this particular print.

So while I technically wasn’t involved in the making of the print I saw in the underground, I still felt a thrill in seeing…

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William Sidnam
William Sidnam

Written by William Sidnam

New Zealand creative based in Paris. Advertising copywriter & photographer with 3 Medium Staff Picks. Documenting metro posters at www.instagram.com/metrotears/

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