The film is still up on Diesel's own YouTube channel, sixteen years later. That is its own kind of result.
We had to run this one eventually. It is the campaign our studio is named after, and we did not pick the name because of the ads, we picked it because Diesel was right.
By 2010 Diesel had a problem that is easy to describe and hard to fix. It had been the brand with a sense of humour, the one running deliberately idiotic ads under the tagline "For Successful Living" while everyone else did tasteful. Then premium denim got crowded, and Diesel drifted into looking like everyone else: aloof, beautiful, expensive, saying nothing.
The insight underneath the fix is the good bit. Fashion advertising sells aspiration by showing perfection, on the theory that you want to be better looking. But that is not really what a twenty-two-year-old envies. What they envy is nerve. The person who is having a better night than you is not smarter than you. They are just less afraid of looking like an idiot. Perfection is not the aspirational quality in that room. Willingness to be embarrassed is.
Do not write a tagline. Publish a philosophy, and redefine a word while you are at it.
Stupid, as Diesel used it, does not mean unintelligent. It means unguarded. It is the thing you do before you have talked yourself out of it. Every line in the campaign is built as a straight comparison, smart on one side, stupid on the other, and stupid wins every time.
Posters and print, shot by Kristin Vicari, Melodie McDaniel and Chris Buck, of people committing to something ridiculous with total conviction: a man in a leather jacket eating a full lobster dinner on an inflatable swan, a woman crouched next to a black panther in the desert. The type is enormous, flat and set in a colour that fights the photograph rather than flattering it. There is no product benefit anywhere. There is barely any product.
Then the line escapes the ad. It went into store windows, catalogues, a printed manifesto book, and a t-shirt that became one of Diesel's biggest sellers of the year, which is the moment a campaign stops being advertising and becomes something people volunteer to wear. Renzo Rosso, who founded the company, adopted it as the corporate philosophy and later titled his own book after it.
The stupid: spend a global fashion budget telling people to be stupid. Put the word on the window of every store you own. Charge premium prices while your own posters argue that thinking things through is for cowards. Then run photography provocative enough that the UK regulator receives complaints and pulls two of your posters off the street.
The smart: it is not a slogan, it is a definition, and definitions travel further than slogans. By redefining stupid as brave, Diesel quietly reclassified every rival's tasteful, careful, beautiful campaign as evidence of timidity. It never has to mention a competitor. The comparison is built into the word. It also hands the customer a line to say about themselves, which is the actual product a fashion brand sells, and it is short enough to fit on a chest. And it was true to the company, not invented for the brief: Diesel had been the stupid one for twenty years, so this reads as a brand remembering itself rather than a brand acting out.
The steal: pick the word your category uses as an insult, and take ownership of it. Cheap, slow, small, boring, stupid. If you can define it on your own terms before anyone else does, every competitor who was implicitly claiming the opposite starts looking like they are hiding something.
The reason it matters to us is the second half of the thought, and Diesel did not say it, so we will. Stupid on its own is just noise. What makes this campaign good is not that somebody was brave, it is that the bravery was then executed with total discipline: one construction, held across dozens of lines, one type treatment, one photographic idea, no wobble. The wildness is in the thinking and the rigour is in the making. Get those the wrong way round and you get careful ideas produced sloppily, which is most advertising.
Straight talk: Diesel and Anomaly have never published audited sales figures for Be Stupid, and we are not going to invent one. What is on the record is that the brand was drifting before it and culturally live again after it, that the t-shirt was among its biggest sellers, and that the philosophy outlived the campaign inside the company. The ASA ruling is the sharpest verifiable fact in the set: 33 complaints, breaches of the CAP Code on responsible advertising and decency, the posters banned from outdoor but expressly cleared to keep running in magazines, because a poster cannot choose who sees it. Six weeks later the same work took the Outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes. Banned outdoors, best outdoor work in the world. Both juries were arguably right.
And the honest coda: Diesel moved global creative duties to Publicis Italia after roughly ten months with Anomaly. The most talked-about fashion campaign of its year did not save the relationship. Winning the argument and keeping the account are different games.
One Show: Gold in Print and Gold in Posters, plus a Bronze in Design and a Merit. D&AD Bronze in Print. Clio Bronze in Print. Andy Bronze in Retail.
Client: Diesel (founder and chairman Renzo Rosso; artistic director Bruno Collin)
Agency: Anomaly, New York, with Anomaly London on the manifesto film
Executive creative director: Mike Byrne
Creative directors: Kevin Lyons, Richard Mulder
Art directors: Ian Toombs, Andrea Gustafson, Coral Garvey
Copywriter: Sean McLaughlin
Photographers: Kristin Vicari, Melodie McDaniel, Chris Buck
Ad Age, Diesel wins the Outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes 2010
Campaign, the ASA ruling on the Be Stupid posters
Marketing Week, the complaints and the decision
Sean McLaughlin, the copywriter's own case notes and the full poster set
Ads of the World, the work and credits
Media Marketing, Diesel moves global creative to Publicis Italia
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: