Shock Value Helps an Obscure Jeans Maker Be Not So Obscure
Few Americans have heard of Diesel jeans--let alone stuck their legs into a pair.
At nearly $90 each--about three times the cost of Levi’s--these Italian-made jeans are not found in the denim bin at Kmart. The sole department store that stocks them in New York City is Bloomingdale’s. And in Los Angeles, they’re sold only at a handful of chic boutiques.
So how does such an obscure maker of pricey jeans get its target market--teens with wealthy parents--to spend less money on CDs and more money on its duds? Advertising, of course. Not just any advertising, mind you, but irony-laden ads with social messages that make Diesel the first advertiser to at least temporarily out-Benetton Benetton.
Picture this: One of its recent print ads features photos of a gun-wielding young man who suggests that “teaching kids to kill helps them deal directly with reality.” The ad continues: “If they never learn to blast the brains out of their neighbors, what kind of damm future has this country of ours got?”
Pretty funny, huh? Well, not to the readers of Premiere magazine--a general interest publication about the film industry. After the magazine published the ad two months ago, it received hundreds of calls and letters of protest from its readers. In its June issue, Premiere’s editor authored an apology to readers, vowing to never again run the ad.
For small companies such as Diesel--particularly apparel firms with tiny ad budgets--the best shortcut to notoriety is through ads that shock. The shock value of ads by Benetton or Calvin Klein has typically been pegged to flashy pictures of sex, death or destruction. But the Diesel campaign takes the shock a step further by adding outrageous words. Although the words are supposed to be bitingly ironic, consumers don’t always understand. And that’s the problem.
“With one ad, Diesel got a whole new presence in the market,” said Fred Danzig, editor of Advertising Age. “They went for the jugular, and any time an advertiser does that, it’s bound to upset some people.”
Or, in Diesel’s case, many people.
So many, in fact, that the company’s founder is now admitting that his company blew it. “It was a big mistake,” Renzo Rosso said in a phone interview from Italy. “The problem was our (Swedish) ad agency tried to deliver an ironic message in English, and it didn’t work. People who know me know that I wouldn’t intentionally do something like this.”
To prove it, he said, Diesel will soon run an ad campaign that focuses on love. What’s more, he added, the company has killed the gun ad.
But not everyone buys that explanation. “Diesel’s campaign relies on the tried and true: a heavy degree of flash and provocation,” said Alan Millstein, president of the New York-based Fashion Network Report newsletter. “They’re in the hype business. They know how to generate as much controversy as possible.”
Indeed, the gun ad isn’t the only Diesel ad to raise eyebrows. A series of social issue ads the company has run satirize everything from smoking to plastic surgery. Each ad also features a photo of a model--often a skimpily clad woman--wearing Diesel jeans.
The anti-smoking ad shows a voluptuous woman seated on a five-foot-long cigarette next to the headline, “How to smoke 145 (cigarettes) a day.” The ad asks: “Why stop at bronchitis when a faster heartbeat and a shorter life are just around the corner?” And the ad that lampoons plastic surgery shows a razor blade stuck in a slab of meat, with the headline, “How to reach perfection.” The ad proposes, “Why be yourself when you can be somebody else?”
But it is the gun ad that has raised the most eyebrows.
“We’ve never received a response like that to anything we’ve run in the magazine,” said Susan Lyne, editor of Premiere, who wrote an apology note about the ad to readers. “We mostly heard from people with teen-age children who said their kids didn’t understand the irony.” Most of the writers, she said, “were fiercely angry.”
Two other magazines that also ran the ad--Interview and Details--said their readers didn’t complain. Still, Details--which had previously rejected six Diesel ads before running the gun ad--said it has since suggested to Diesel to revamp its ad strategy, said Mitchell Fox, publisher of Details. “We told them that the way to express irony and sarcasm in America is very different than in Europe.”
At one point, Diesel U.S.A., the company’s New York-based U.S. division, says it was receiving 25 letters and calls a day about the gun ad--”99% of them against it,” said Massimo Ferrucci, vice president.
One professor from Cal State Fullerton was so upset with the gun ad that he sent a scathing letter to the industry trade magazine Advertising Age. “I nominate (these) people as charter members of a new category for despicable behavior in advertising,” said James W. Taylor, who teaches marketing at the school.
Not everyone, however, is turned off by the ad.
Executives at Benetton say they like it. “If you are a jeans maker you can’t run with the pack and expect to get any attention,” said Peter Fressola, spokesman at Benetton. “Jeans are about sex and danger. And the people who are offended by these ads are probably not Diesel customers anyway.”
While the ads haven’t yet made Diesel a household name, they have certainly caught the attention of some key consumers. The firm expects its U.S. sales to double in 1993.
“I may be Italian, but I love the U.S.,” said Rosso, who will fly to Los Angeles this week for the grand opening of a Diesel boutique at the ultra-hip American Rag clothing store on La Brea Avenue. “Everything made in America I will buy.”
But the question remains: Will Americans buy everything made by Diesel?
Briefly . . .
Don’t look now, but ads strategically “tiled” into the floor at supermarkets are being unveiled this week by the Indoor Media Group of Fort Worth. . . . The Los Angeles office of BBDO Worldwide has picked up 20th Century Fox Film Corp.’s estimated $50-million spot TV and newspaper buying account, previously handled by the New York office of Young & Rubicam. . . . The Santa Monica agency Suissa Miller, which already handles residential and retail business units for the Schlage Lock Co., has also won the commercial unit of the $5-million account. . . . A new ad shop plans to open in Los Angeles next month, TRS Scott Group, a branch office of the New York agency Towne, Silverstein, Rotter. . . . Advertising Age reports that International Creative Management is expected to soon announce an agreement to work on a retainer basis for at least one top ad agency. . . . Swatch is testing how the Los Angeles market reacts to an ad campaign for Swatch Eyes, a sunglass line that is the first line extension of the Swatch Watch brand. . . . Several Los Angeles-based television marketing experts have formed Television Group International.
