Diesel Jeans Advert Analysis

Conceptual Analysis of a print advertisement rooted to 4 key media concepts.





I am analysing the diesel jeans campaign “live fast”. This particular advert was taken out of the July issue of Cosmopolitan. It depicts a tall and attractive woman running down a road in heels whilst changing a baby. This is a large risk to the baby, and inconsiderate. This represents a fast paced action which corresponds with the title of the advert.

Codes and Conventions (Purpose and Effect)
The woman pictured in the advert is in the middle of sprinting down the pavement. She had extremely long, skinny model legs and is wearing a pair of diesel jeans. There is a baby in her arms, lying on a towel. It seems to be unphased by the woman running and may possibly even be asleep. She is putting talc on the baby, which would be an impossible task to do whilst running. The writing in the bottom left corner says “Live Fast”. The font is made to look like the text is moving, in the same direction of the girl. In the top right hand corner there is the brand logo and its tag line “for successful living” and in the bottom right corner it says “high speed shopping: diesel.com”. The woman is the main focus of the advert, at first glance you would assume that the advert would be referring to her clothing but it is also advertising the “high speed shopping” that diesel.com offers.
The image is not very culturally specific; I feel the advert is American and the woman looks fairly young and independent. There is nobody else in this advert apart from the baby, which we assume is hers. The advert is associated with an appealing lifestyle because the woman is beautiful, slim and dressed well. She is running with a sleeping baby down a sunny road without any hassle. She is independent and confident which is a good message to diesels audience but she could easily hurt the baby in her arms which is irresponsible.

Representation
The kind of lifestyle being represented is nice at a first glance, I think most women would want to look like that and find running in heels with a sleeping baby easy. However in the real world that would never happen because of the colossal risk of dropping the baby or falling over and hurting her. There is not much detail about the location; all we see is a tall white wall and grass. I cannot recognise any negative representation of the woman, the tag line says “for successful living” and the woman is successfully carrying out the task in the photo. She is wearing expensive and stylish but simple clothing. It’s purely for the love of money, the “live fast” tag is meant to encourage people to die fast but spend all of their money while they are at it and just let materialism take them over. I only realised this when I looked at the other ads in the campaign I realised that they were actually really sickening.

Audience
I think that they are trying to attract young, stupid, fashionable and well off people with a fashionable lifestyle. The woman in the picture represents their target market age group. She is Rushing about wearing diesel jeans and attractive like most young girls want to be. The picture is sunny and the baby is sleeping which makes what she is doing look easy and that she has no morals to what would happen to the baby if she landed on it. The advert is almost comical. I didn’t realise some of the subliminal messages when I first saw these adverts. At first glance you see independence, glamour and nice clothes but after researching this particular ad campaign has a deeper message that is “don’t care about anything else apart from looking good” the picture below is from the same campaign and shows a girl who is oblivious to running into an ice cream truck because she’s obsessed with looking in the mirror.





Institutions
Tagline: High speed shopping: diesel.com
Product : Fashion jeans and clothing
Agency : Marcel Paris
Photographer: Laurie Bartley
Executive Creative Director: Frederic Temin / Anne de Maupeou
Art Director: Nicolas Chauvin / Romin Favre
Copywriter: Eric Jannon / Dimitri Guerassimov
Country : France


Evaluation
These adverts are aimed at young people that can afford to spend a little extra on clothes; they have a strong message that “image is everything” I disagree with this concept however I think they have been clever enough to disguise that concept in this image in particular. If you see the whole campaign together you get a better idea of the message they are putting across.