Levi Strauss & Co., Jump Rope
An attractive, shirtless young blond guy begins joyously jumping rope on a sandy beach in a semi-macho way and he is identified as "Kevin, Pittsburgh."
Soon, another guy starts jumping with him (this one has a T-shirt) and more text appears, identifying Kevin as "Attacked in the street" ... "for being gay."
Then to a Bob Dylan-like song that says "Let it all hang out," many other same-sex couples appear and they happily bounce together, sometimes holding each other -- one guy even squeezes another's butt.
The tagline for Levis Engineered Jeans then appears: "Free to move."
Unfortunately, this ad never aired in Europe as intended, though some in Australia have reported seeing it. Levi Europe's spokesman Paola Brandi said: "Our European marketing team tested a creative concept based on the tagline 'Free to Move.' The idea was simple -- when thinking about what freedom means to our company, we looked at our company's long history of values and corporate social responsibility. Since our company and our Levi
Strauss Foundation have been leaders in embracing diversity and the fight against HIV/AIDS, we looked at addressing these social issues in the pilot work, which featured real people.
"Although we believed, and still believe, in the message, the ad did not meet our marketing objectives. As usual before releasing advertisements, we conducted research on an extensive sample of European youth (our primary
target market). Regrettably, the data collected showed that the message we wanted to deliver was not communicated by this pilot work. We therefore chose to launch the product in Europe with a new marketing approach that better delivered our product messages: 'Twisted to Fit.' "
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