Localspeak

Levi®’s Go Forth “We Are All Workers” Marketing Campaign: Aspirational or Exploitative?

9 August 2011

As Levi’s prepares to launch its first global integrated marketing campaign in the company’s 138-year history, Localspeak thought it appropriate to step back and take a look at some of the controversy this past year that surrounded the company’s Go Forth marketing campaign titled We Are All Workers . Launched in June 2010, this campaign was met with strong criticism—even cynicism inspiring a number of YouTube parodies. Sparking uproar, even brand loyalists began to question the company’s historical socially-responsible stance.

With brand equity always at stake in a competitive environment, it is essential for brand managers, marketers, advertisers and researchers to find a tool that can deliver actionable insights in a quick and cost-effective manner. For us, that tool is Netbase Insight Workbench . Since Localspeak began using it in June for U.S. and English-speaking countries, we have used Insight Workbench to explore the insights of social net sentiment trend tracking to discern whether or why our findings might suggest a real-time imperative to reposition, redirect, or refine an event and its tone, messaging and tactics.

This month we used the robust tool to gauge the barometric sentiment behind the social flap over Levi’s “We Are The Workers” ad campaign, and to see what the brand may or may not be listening to.

We first began to track net sentiment for the Levi’s campaign, which launched in June 2010 with a $55 million multimedia campaign that featured Braddock, PA (pop. 3000), a rusting former steel mill town overtaken by urban blight. Despite Levi’s financial commitment to the town, the artistry and romance with Depression-era values in the campaign has been criticized for revealing more of Levi’s hubris rather than its altruism. The ad has also been lambasted for distortions in its historic storytelling, which seems to exalt the aspirational values of an era through a comparison today that risks spreading fear and anxiety. Further, the ad has been viewed as being over-embellished and insensitive, as was noted in these online posts:

Levis: Go Forth and Exploit, Part 1
In their campaign, Levi’s has romanticized the Depression era through their beautiful, moody black and white photography, and trivialized the experience of those who suffered through it in the process. By invoking the “Grapes of Wrath” metaphor, Levi’s has implied that we are, as a country, facing similar hardships by linking those images with narratives and slogans like “We are all workers” and “Go Forth to Work”. source

Go Forth (and Step In It): Levi’s and All Those Frontiers The Rest of Us Can’t See
… The ad in question is a genius melding of amnesiac musings, blue collar fetishism, and astoundingly brazen brand-name posturing
posted by Shaun

The irony of Levi’s romanticizing a working-class theme and setting— a sentiment shared by others who deride the brand for harboring a “sweatshop” culture in their own factories abroad— was not lost on online consumers:

I hate Levi’s ads. They promote that there are frontiers here in America to conquer. Like they really give a crap. Go Forth… they say. Go forth and move all your manufacturing overseas, close factories here, lay of workers and try to still claim you care. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Roger Cropley

Social Sentiment – Levi’s ‘Go Forth’ June Campaign

The Braddock Catwalk

Although the production shoot purportedly used local Braddock talent, further reproach was leveled at the Levi’s campaign, charging that the ad’s models bore no resemblance to the townspeople, a community evidently suffering from unhealthy weight issues:

Levis & Braddock: Exploitation or Visibility? The criticisms of this campaign have been many, loud, and angry. There are at least three lines of argument against Levis and Fetterman for this partnership. First, from within Braddock itself, veteran filmmaker Tony Buba —who has made Braddock the star of virtually all of his films and political activism for thirty years—complains that few of the models in the Braddock/Levis campaign look like anyone who still lives in Braddock. “I never knew there were that many thin people in Braddock until I watched those spots — or that many people with six-pack abs. You don’t see anybody 300 pounds and wearing a pair of Levi’s jeans walking across the screen.”
source

Channeling Walt Whitman

Levi’s and its creative agency, Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), say the We Are The Workers campaign was developed to inspire and motivate disaffected American youth to “Go Forth” (Translation: buy the jeans and ye shall prevail). Explaining the creative proposition of the campaign, Tyler Whisnand, creative director at W+K/Portland, had this to say:

“America is quite honest and realistic about what’s going on in the country and the world…It’s about the spirit of America in transition. It [America] looks toward the future with the words of Whitman talking about the potential of Americans and how Americans filled with justice and love can persevere – and Levi’s is a brand that’s going to equip you for that.”
source

Still invoking Whitman, others appreciate the positioning of the poetically compelling commercial, in particular W+K’s July 4th Go Forth video:

love this Levi’s- – Walt Whitman & O’Pioneers great for the 4th & intro/discussion cues #sschat #edchat

However, the artistry was lost on at least one Gen Y target demographic, as the Berkeley Beacon reports. After seeing Levi’s use of Whitman’s regaled poem ‘America’, a young Emerson film student, Alex Pulido, made a 2-minute short, American Disillusion , complete with a wax cylinder recording of Whitman reading the first verse of the poem. According to the post, “Pulido believes Whitman wouldn’t be happy if his work was being used to sell jeans, so the director went out and tried to find the America in his backyard.
source

High Marks for Water.org Partnership

The firestorm over last year’s We Are The Workers campaign has been succeeded by Levi’s new advertising iterations, with the brand receiving high marks for social responsibility in partnering with Water.org— a nonprofit organization dedicated to supplying clean drinking water to developing countries. The new ad campaign began in conjunction with the launch of Levi’s new Water/Less jeans in March 2010, as Levi’s celebrated World Water Day in partnership with the nonprofit group. And just this past week on the Levi’s Facebook page , Levi’s launched a new program in support of the Water.org mission, pledging a financial donation once the page had received 100,000 fan clicks pledging support.

This post reflects today’s more positive online sentiment for the brand:

At launch, the Levi’s® brand will enable people the world over to support pioneers by introducing the work of Water.org.
source

Levi’s agency W+K is renowned for artistically playing the edge in its creative work and brilliant in its use of social media. As they roll out Levi’s first integrated global ad campaign in the company’s 138-year history, the Go Forth aspirational overcoming adversity subtheme underpinning Go Forth’s campaign endures – paralleling the darkening global economic horizon – as do Levi’s philanthropic inventions.

Germany’s Go Forth Campaign Anchored By Modern Innovators of Change

Levi’s latest Go Forth campaign has since moved abroad, with its new “Now is our time” campaign offering a message of hope and empowerment to German youth. As noted in this Creative Review blog , the campaign features local pioneers fighting for change, and who have been depicted in murals throughout the city of Berlin. In addition, Levi’s made a social mark during this year’s Berlin Fashion Week, with the company heralding global “green glamour” and sustainability, as covered by a reporter in this recent Reuters article .

Levi’s Unbranded Curve ID Ad Parallels -50% Advertising Net Sentiment

Given Levi’s overall positive net sentiment during the past 12-months, February’s -50% downtick when filtered for advertising caught our attention, leading us to further investigate potential root causes. Insight Workbench filter tools, which use computational linguistic science to process terabytes of social conversations, provide discovery insights on an Internet scale that help lead to smarter business decisions.

When “viral unbranded campaign” popped up in our search, such posts as the one in the UK newspaper Guardian below, provided insight. Within two weeks of its appearance online in mid-February, the Levi’s Curve ID campaign video ‘Rear View Girls’ had registered 7 million views. It seems that the missing rear Levi’s logo raised eyebrows and questions, in particular “Why?” Levi’s corporate reply raised even more eyebrows:

[it was an] “experiment without any creative direction from us”.

Have you checked out the Rear View Girls ass cam yet? Nope, it’s not spam promoting an anal fetishist site. It’s an unbranded YouTube video from Levi’s, created to market their new Curve ID range.
source

Levi’s Social Advertising Sentiment Falls -50% in February

On a more positive note, other sentiments applauded Levi’s consumer engagement and its use of viral as a refreshing innovative new take on traditionally staid advertising, in general.

Social Media Sentiment At Work

Utilizing NetBase’s Insight Workbench, we were able to extract and map unbiased sentiment trends for the Levi’s campaign accurately and expediently over the period of a year. The results we find using Workbench provide robust real-time insights for creative teams and researchers alike, and they can be combined with other more traditional research analytics. In the near future, we anticipate that social media tools will be available to provide sentiment tracking of global events in additional languages to be analyzed concurrently.