Hello Everyone,

Before starting this week’s note I would like to make a statement.
As frequent readers of this blog already knew, I’ve been writing on this blog for almost two years. And what I am doing here, well, I basically aiming to increase and contribute both myself and collective advertising literacy.

Basically I am trying to uncover codes of the commercials here. What was the marketing thinking behind them, what was the social thinking, consumer thinking etc.? And I am also trying to uncover why they used such particular codes what they were aiming to achieve? Things like that…

While I have been doing this, recently I realized that limiting my audience to Turkish speaking marketing and communication community is unfair, considering the fact that most of the cases I am covering are the international ones.

So from now on, I will write non-Turkish cases in English. Hopefully my fellow non-Turkish sparker friends will like it too… The English section in the blog also, English version of my credentials, will also be launched soon. So stay tune for more 🙂

Welcome again and enjoy the readings. Also please feel free to share with your friends 🙂

Cheers,
Cem

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Diesel YUK Shoes: A call for reality!

We are all living in a strange world.

With the rise of technology and social media, the rules of the game have been changed. Today is a world which virtual imageries replaced with real selves, and curation is overshadowing the creation.

We are all curating our visual images, nourish it, and polish it, market it, competing based on it and most of the time even judging ourselves and others over it. Likes becomes far more important than ideas. And popularity becomes far more important than essence, experience and wisdom.

Originality and creative thinking has never been a less of commodity.

Now we all are walking buzz words. Our perception of the world has been limited with our Facebook and Twitter flows. We are all living, working, creating, sharing in the similar virtual and real eco systems.

As a result of that we are all big living data junks, thinking ourselves different and unique from others. But actually we are all deriving our personality from similar virtual flows.

Even the real world activates becoming part of this virtual phenomenon, including the sports and sports brands such as Nike. They all are adopting themselves into this big data and curation world.

Recent launches of Nike such as Nike+ shoes and Nike+ FuelBand are all based on this trend.

Off course as a rule when a trend rises in society its counter-trend or reaction also rises simultaneously. Because trends are edgy things by definition and edgy things creates polarization.

The side effect of this virtual social world and selves phenomena is, we are all taking this virtual world for granted and as a result of that we are losing ourselves in virtual competition.

We even feel depressed sometimes about how everybody else’s lives are perfect compare to ourselves (they are actually curated visual images but that’s all we see…) and most of the time we feel overwhelmed, exhausted, inadequate and insufficient against this constantly flowing virtual data, happenings and curations.

Deep down we all know the ridiculousness and non-sense of it but we do not want to stay behind and we felt obliged to be a part of it.

That was exactly Diesel’ insight when they were launching their legendary YUK shoes for its 20th year anniversary.

Diesel copies are not only reaction and opportunistic counter act against Nike’s hyper technological and socially competitive Nike+ line, but it is also the reaction against current narcissist social media paradigm.

While we are all talking about the importance of content and story in this exploding social media craze, that’s definitely the kind of brand and attempt we all would like to see.

It is not only reflecting a true consumer thinking and reaction but also underlines and emphasizes the importance of insight notion to create genuine resonating stories. Even in this curation oriented social media world…

To conclude, these kinds of brands will be only ones, remain after this curation bloom gets normalized. Brands who put genuine insight, depth and dimension in their communication efforts will be the ones who win eventually and resonate into consumers’ hearts from generations to generations, obviously in every available and upcoming communication channels.

And Diesel is one of the best brands who are doing it so successfully. Also this campaign, as expectedly fits very well with the Diesel’s controversial and non-conformist attitude.

So well done to the team for the brilliant thinking… 🙂