We're launching this blog with Levi’s Go Forth ad campaign – not because it’s an exquisite example of global marketing (which it is), or an unabashedly aggressive effort to co-opt national ideals (which it definitely is), but because I really enjoy the ads. I like them! When the Go Forth commercials come on in movie theaters, I'm racked with emotion in my seat in the greasy dark – anachronistic nostalgia, baseless patriotism. And yesterday, as I perused my October issue of Rolling Stone, the Levi’s full-page ad seemed so beautiful (all those fireworks and freedom) that I ripped it out and sticky-tacked it to my wall, where it joined the illustrious ranks of Pink Floyd and Kurt Cobain.
Here's why I like Levi’s latest advertising scheme – and it goes beyond my penchant for classic Americana imagery. With this campaign, the Levi advertisers are placing faith in the fact that American kids can still respond to un-ironic media, or that we still get sentimental sometimes. This campaign is to the ad-world as Springsteen is to rock-world – straddling the fine line between nostalgic cool and ridiculous, and ultimately hoping that the audience wants to be seduced. Of course, we’re all hyper-aware of being manipulated, so the campaign’s blatant appeal to our hyper-American emotions might end up being massively unsuccessful. But there’s no hint of the typikal postmodern message-encryption in their advertising; there's nothing to “figure out,” no cleverly embedded jokes. It’s a disarmingly straightforward idealization of frontier America, and if you watch one of their minute-long videos, the intended messages are clear: beautiful kids are fighting in the streets, revolution is in the air, fuck the Man, America is still a vast wilderness to be explored, and “Now Is Our Time.”
This strikes me as a super-optimistic campaign in the United States, hoping to access some dormant, irony-free patriotism in the hearts of American youth – but it seems even more improbable beyond America's borderz. I mean, Levi's Jeans Co hardly changes its tactics at all when marketing denim in China and India, which just goes to show that they're peddling "classic America" -- not jeans.
Whether or not the campaign succeeds in selling jeans, part of me hopes that somebody in every movie-theater feels shaken and stunned after the commercial fizzles out into the scratchy image of a sparkler, while Walt Whitman’s voice reverberates in the dark. I hope that one heart in every audience beats faster at images of fireworks and empty lots and multiracial makeout sessions, even if those feelings are trumped soon afterwards by the too-true reminder, “They’re pants.” It's hard to say how successful this campaign will be in the long run. But at least the advertisers seem to be exploiting patriotism over materialism, nostalgia over newness -- which, in the end, is placing a lot of faith in We the Consumers.
One of the (in)famous Go Forth commercials.
And another one, feat. Walt Whitman Himself!
This is what I found in my Rolling Stone mag.
And this is version number two (in Chinese).
