Dear j’adore Dior
Thank you for being brilliant at Compound-Creativity, which was one of the big marketing buzzwords of 2025, thanks to the wonderful work of System1, who provided the empirical data to prove what many have long-postulated.
I saw your Rhianna ad and having missed the logo in the first 5 seconds (doom-scrolling probs) within the next 3 seconds, I knew it was you.
Your Rhianna campaign is the same. But not exactly the same. As your long-running Charlize Theron campaign. And the Carmen Kass campaign before that.
The gold, the water, the neck, the purposeful striding, the dress, the shoes, the eye-contact, the iconic bottle.
25+ years of compound creativity leading to instant (for me at least) brand recognition - and I’ll be honest, I’m not really in the market, perhaps because I can’t but mostly find Fragrance Advertising to be pretty silly. It’s ripe for laugh-out-loud satire, and general eye-rolling amongst the more cynical… "Water is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty" and all that.
Errr. Yes and… We humans do seem to buy a lot of fragrance. And we don’t just buy it for ourselves, we give it to other people, yup, especially at Christmas. (Psychology of Gifting and What-it Says-about-Me rabbit-hole banked for a different post). The fragrance market was around a $50bn in 2025 and is projected to grow to more than $75bn by 2032 (according to Forbes Business Insights).
And with margins that most categories would kill for……A bit of a silliness-paradox emerges: Silly advertising (IMHO) that appears to work extremely well in convincing people to part with a lot of their money, in exchange for smelling nice (and all the much more important emotive benefits that come with, er, the consistency of branding and communications that tap into our deepest psychological motivations – power, play, pro-creation, security etc). Anyway, J’adore Dior, with all that money and liquid gold sloshing around and tempting you to try a different creative direction, I genuinely admire your Compound-Creativity…sticking with it, but keeping it fresh. J’adore. In fact, you’re so strongly woven into my memory structures that I don’t even find you silly. Thanks again Ned