La Bella Vita: Gucci as Inspiration, Metatphor, & Meaning in Creative Content Strategy
There’s a lot going on.
So, why talk about a two year-old Gucci ad campaign featuring the canine stoicism of Orso and Bosco, the Boston terriers of Gucci’s Creative Director Alessandro Michele, when the streets are pulsing with protest and the air carries a virus that to date has killed over 428,000 people, over 34,000 of those humans in Italy (home to the Italian luxury brand of said campaign)?
Gucci’s Lucky Year of the Dog campaign. Live and in color.
And another, site-specific question: why should a creative content agency like Frank, peopled by text wizards and poets, be concerned with creative content that features almost no words?
Cuz, art. And cuz, attitude.
The Frank Mouth crew decided a while back that we would devote these notes, this blog space, to conversations about things we like and admire in the content marketing sphere, and why. Be it funny, beautiful, smart, provocative or a combo plate, what makes a strategy successful? What content is so impactful that it affects change? Not just the big change, the seismic uplift so many of us want so desperately to see in our world (and many are enacting, right now), but also the shift, however subtle, that skews perspective sufficiently to alter the way we see and understand that which draws our attention.
Paying Gucci customers comprise a small percentage of the buying populace, but the surreal beauty and sheer absurdity of The Lucky Year of the Dog campaign is a public consumable, like roundabout sculpture, or airport art. The photographs depict mercilessly groomed dogs ready for their close-ups in soft-focused gardens, languid models wearing terrier-themed satin baseball jackets and sneakers, oversized dog-faced watches and pup-muzzle rings dangling from wrists and slack digits. The hydrangeas, lurid, are almost carnivorous in their blues.
Go baroque or go home.
The whole vibe is ridiculous, and somehow deadly serious. To pull off cheek at this level takes immense confidence, total commitment. It requires a belief in the transformative power of art as regular imbibement, as our daily bread. It insists on the right to exist. Of course, it’s Italian. Beauty so saturated we’re a little disturbed. Comedy so intense we have to cry, a little. Italy! the source of most of Shakespeare’s plot lines, and Italians! who sang a throaty note of persistence in the face of terror from one balcony to the next.
From the folks who brought you the Sistine Chapel, behold a glorious tribute to the legacy of human aspiration and quest for the magnificent via the overwrought (or almost), writ small enough to view on your Android. Leave the minimalism to some other brand, Gucci is all go baroque or go home, there’s no reality like surreality. Life is beautiful. We like dogs. Oscar Wilde said life is too important to be taken seriously.
Cheek, unbound.
James Baldwin said, “I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.” He also said things about how important it is for an artist to learn how to be alone. In this current era, alone as often as we are, the accidental encounters we make with art, the surprise of it, can be scarce. One can legitimately hate the Gucci ads for their unsmiling frivolity, see them as garish, criticize the entire concept of the luxury brand. But one will have seen and experienced them, and is likely to remember them as something outside the ordinary, as something borne of a dream and executed in style, as something someone thought had to be done.
James Baldwin also said, “Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.”
And c’mon, those dogs.