"Global Warming Ready" Just Means More Hip And Trendy Beaches.

MayorBob.

Posted to Business on Fri Feb 23, 2007 at 07:01:40 AM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.

You might call it a case of making lemonade out of life when you're dealt lemons.  Or, you might call it a cynical manipulation of a serious topic in pursuit of selling the latest, hippest and trendiest of fashions.  Then again you might call it a company which is all about the superficiality of fashion discovering a "cause."  Whatever, Diesel, the Italian fashion design firm is making big waves by running an ad campaign which looks at the issue of global warming, only with sexy results this time.

The full length treatment is available at Diesel's web site by clicking on "Collection" and then "Advertising Campaign."  The video begins like something Al Gore would narrate - full of all the bad stuff about global warming and the gloom and doom.  But then, it takes a U-Turn and says "hey, why should the party stop just because the ocean's rising?"  Then begins a slick series of fashion shots shilling the latest Diesel has to peddle with lean and beautiful models gamboling about in some unlikely locales.  There's the studmuffin sunning himself on the beach next to Mt. Rushmore.  There's the sand dunes cresting over the Great Wall of China.  There's a trio posed among the parrots in St. Mark's Square in Venice.  And there's the underlying message -- no need to end the rockin' good times global warming brings - there's plenty of hot bodies and cool garments in our future.

The still fashion shots at the end of the video show will begin appearing in all the major fashion magazines this month.  But, just to show Diesel isn't totally crass, they do offer tips on what we can to combat global warming: turn off the lights, walk to the store, learn to do with less heating or air conditioning, etc.  There's even a link to stopglobalwarming.org one assumes just to show how truly concerned they really are about this.

It looks like Diesel has managed to grab for the brass ring and came up with two of them.  As Libby Coleman of the Washington Post points out, Diesel's ad expresses "the triumph of cleverness over meaning, of sarcasm over what's sacred" and says we "can't be too well-dressed for the apocalypse."  But then the campaign also gets to join itself at the hip of a cause.  Causes are good because they make us feel noble in reaching for them, no matter what sort of superfluity we're involved in by doing so.  Cause is important because by hooking up with one, a savvy marketer can "figure out how to drive a response that's emotional" according to one marketing expert.  The unspoken truth here is that, in the world of fashion, all sales tend to be driven more by emotion than logic.

Diesel is hardly the only company in the business of trying to marry up cause and commerce.  Classically, there's the Mac Daddy of merging marketing with a cause, Benneton.  Motorola and Sprint have come up with a campaign aimed at eradicating AIDS in Africa one cell phone sale at a time.  However, if Diesel's whole campaign seems a bit off perhaps you might just agree with Sarah Silverman and take steps to help speed up the process a bit.