Jamie O’Neal
October 22nd, 2014
Eng 112-02
Be Stupid (it’ll be fun) Diesel’s ad campaign “Be Stupid” is award-winning, simple and to the point. It portrays a proposed way of life with visual metaphors of stretching boundaries and breaking the rules to have more fun. This specific ad shows a man’s lower half clothed in Diesel jeans with a bare-legged female crawling on top of him and another scantily clad female underneath the bed, hiding and covering her mouth. Diesel seems to be trying to encourage and celebrate being “stupid” as a new way of life that is against the status quo of an uptight society. All of the ads are of young and attractive people doing some kind of an illegal, sexual or shocking act. Though this campaign was thought to be pure gold by its creators and even by the Cannes International Advertising Festival, it was banned in the UK with good reason. This advertisement specifically, along with most of the others is inappropriate for children, offensive and encourages distasteful and rebellious behavior. Diesel had a good technique in targeting a specific audience with this campaign by making all of the taglines encouraging for the youth to take chances and not to fear failure, but pairing that message with images of girls flashing cameras or hiding half naked under beds is where it goes south. Every single ad in this campaign is portrayed by a young person, being close to naked or doing something sexual. When children see this being celebrated, it tells them that it’s okay to do all of the same things. It tells all the young girls out there that it is okay to be “the other woman” and to be used by men. It tells them that it’s okay to be promiscuous because it is more fun than respecting one’s self. It tells the young men out there that polygamy is okay and it is okay to objectify females. Second of all Diesel knows that sex sells, but this ad is offensive to almost anyone who takes a look at it. What woman in her right mind would act this way if she were in the same situation? No woman that respects herself would ever sit quietly, half clothed under the man’s bed who undressed her to wait for that same man to be with another woman right above her. Hopefully no man in his right mind would believe that he could get away with this either. Their target consumers are mostly teenagers who probably still live at home with their families; this tells us that the parents are buying the clothing but the teens are still the ones being influenced. Any parent who actually takes a look at these ads would definitely not be comfortable with the message that Diesel is sending to their kids. Although it may be true that being rebellious isn’t always a bad thing, Diesel only shows distasteful examples of rebellion in their ads. There is a great difference between liberating one’s self or thinking outside the box and just blatantly disrespecting the rules of society. Diesel could have taken this campaign in many different directions without taking it to an over the top level. They could have been more realistic by sending a message to embrace mistakes and failure with a more realistic approach instead of celebrating indecent exposure and threesomes.
In conclusion, Diesel had a good idea for what could have been an awesome campaign with an uplifting message, but they soiled it with the inappropriate images they used to portray that message. Something that could have been tastefully done was turned into a bunch of teenage girls and boys running around naked and senseless. The whole point of this ad campaign was to liberate the youth from judgment and worry, but Diesel has done almost the exact opposite with the outrageous imagery they chose to use.