Diesel "Find the D" Fall 2023 Ad Campaign

Review of Diesel “Find the D” Fall 2023 Ad Campaign by Art Director Christopher Simmonds and Photographer Johnny Dufort

It’s Diesel’s world, and we’re just living in it. For its Fall 2023 campaign – cheekily titled “Find the D” – the iconically idiosyncratic brand channels Where’s Waldo to create an endlessly fun world within a single image. The campaign was shot by Johnny Dufort with art direction by Christopher Simmonds.

It’s rare for a campaign that features just one image to be successful, but this one does it in the most imaginative and complex way possible. The campaign was captured in a piazza of Breganze, Italy, the home of Diesel’s HQ, where hundreds of Diesel staff members – among them Diesel founder and president Renzo Rosso – and models flood the square. Further augmented and reassembled via cropping and digital collage, the town space is transformed into a fantastical village where every inch of space is occupied by narrative and excitement; like a Where’s Waldo puzzle, the photograph is overloaded with dazzling details and eccentric characters.

The brand has made the smart move of dividing up the main image into several zoomed sections, allowing us to get a closer look at the hundreds of stories and interactions unfolding within close proximity to each other, and all exemplifying that trademark Diesel wit and free-spiritedness. It’s impossible to sum up everything that’s going on, but a boxing match, a magical carriage ride, a queer version of the sailor kiss, a rave, and a soccer team photo offer a few examples of the kind of wide-reaching, glorious chaos going on.

And in a truly smart and fun move, the brand is leveraging the campaign into an actual search puzzle game. After users register through a dedicated website, the game will unfold over the course of two months as each week players are tasked with finding a specific hidden object within the zoomable image. Those who successfully find the object are entered into a drawing to win prizes including a 1DR bag, an Oval D belt skirt, caps, sneakers, sunglasses, watches, Diesel sex toys, fragrances, and more.

Diesel’s imagination and cleverness apparently knows no bounds; with each new campaign the brand imagines another zany and unpredictable (but guaranteed to be fun) offshoot of its ever-expanding world of delightful denim-clad weirdos. With an excellent visual concept and a unique digital activation that takes the concept to its fullest potential, this latest campaign is one of the funnest examples yet.