Diesel’s Fall 2010 Campaign Turns Fashion Marketing on Its Head

Diesel’s previous ad campaigns have been replete with edginess, darkness, and a taste for the hardcore. But recently Diesel has turned a 180 and taken a significantly less serious approach to its advertising. The “Be Stupid” campaign has been a clever reinvention of advertising not because it is introducing a new method of marketing a product but it is difficult to ignore because its ad power lies in its brutal honesty about the methods of marketing. Looking at these photos is an experience akin to watching a Truth commercial divulging the subliminal attempts of Big Tobacco to cause consumers to start smoking…after all, as Diesel says, “There’s no wrong way to do it”…
I love this Diesel ad campaign so much than its predecessors and so much more than most ad campaigns I’ve seen. It is so raw in its appeal, using high intensity hues of canary yellow, cyan, and fuchsia, using the clichés of all of advertising, and illogical photographing. The denim giant is very aware of its audience, the 20-something who wants to enjoy the moratorium of youth and whose naivete makes them the highest sought-after demographic. As young adults, we all want to “Be Stupid”. We’re trusting of much too many people around us (“Trust Stupid”), we’re deeply entrenched in maximizing our social lives (“You’ll Make More Friends”), and we have no problem with trying anything once (“If You’ve Never Tried Stupid, You’ve Never Done Anything At All”). The apparel isn’t even ingeniously arranged and there aren’t really any subliminal messages the ads are trying to convey simply because they don’t have to. The social message displayed is powerful enough to sell. But the most peculiar thing about American consumers can be summed up in a statement by European marketers that explains why we still listen to these messages even when we’re told exactly what it means: “Americans tend to deny their advertising while Europeans ignore their advertising”.