• by Joan Voight , March 1, 2010

Selling classic denim with a digital twist

Is there anyone who grew up in America who thinks that blue jeans are just pants? More often than not, they serve as a piece of clothing that is also a cultural lightning rod - and lately the link between your jeans and your values has gotten even more intense.

You can blame the recession, at least partly. While sales in the apparel industry have been walloped by the global downturn since early 2009, denim jeans sales have been much better, according to a report by market research firm Koncept Analytics. "Denim defies the fundamental structure of the global economy," with the high cost of manufacturing the jeans in the United States actually a selling point for jeans brands, says the report. Consequently, Levi's, Gap and other jeans purveyors put some serious marketing muscle into their brand messages in the last year - with a careful eye on their more profitable premium products.


A Campaign With Legs
Levi Strauss, the San Francisco company that claims to have invented blue jeans during the California Gold Rush, has turned away from fashion and is running a semi-political campaign dubbed "Go Forth," about the brand's pioneering spirit and rugged individualist roots. Between the lines is a clarion call to young Americans to see beyond fashion's "vapid superficiality" as Levi's execs call it, and express their independence. In recent years the company lost its focus and "now we are regrounding our brand, refocusing on our North Star," says Doug Sweeny, Levi's vice president of brand marketing.

On July 4, 2009, Levi's launched the image campaign, produced by hotshot creative agency Wieden+Kennedy Portland, with references to Levi's famous 501 line of jeans. Using both online and offline tools, "we wanted to reinvent the idea of a pioneering spirit for current times," says Susan Hoffman, W+K's executive creative director. A wiki-style "Declaration of Independence" was set up online, backed with print and billboard ads. The print ads ran in sports, fashion, music and culture magazines that target young men. Outdoor ads were erected in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. Later, a Web site with a gallery of user-generated photos and videos was added - attracting 3,500 contributors in six weeks, says Sweeny.

Then, from October to mid-December, a pair of TV spots was launched, using inspirational poetry by Civil-War era poet Walt Whitman and featuring American landscapes, personal portraits and scenes of young people in action. Also in October, the company initiated an online and community-based scavenger hunt for a chest holding $100,000 in gold hidden by a fictional Gold Rush character. The search drummed up buzz via Facebook, Twitter and real-life events. Participants were invited to solve a series of mysteries, keep track of scavengers, or go for the gold themselves. Within 60 days the Levi's Facebook page had about 150,000 fans.

At the end of November a woman from Dallas figured out where the chest of gold was buried - which turned out to be in Utah. She beat out more than 2,000 other players. Since each participant had to register, the company ended up with its own treasure - a list of valuable email addresses. Using the lessons and feedback from the first three marketing "expeditions," Levi's is planning at least one more "Go Forth" online initiative for the second half of 2010, says Sweeny. "The surprise for us is that when your marketing offers a serious concept - such as America's need to rise up in tough times - so many people have strong opinions and want to talk about it," he says.


Blue Velvet
Gap's effort to hustle their denim jeans stirred up controversy in another way. The company turned to blue jeans to save its struggling brand back in August 2009 with the "Born to Fit" campaign. To promote its premium denim collection called "1969," named after the year The Gap was founded, the company eschewed TV spots. Instead it used Web ads, iPhone apps and Facebook, supported by print, cinema and outdoor ads. The company also hosted an acoustic concert at more than 700 stores around the country to kick off the campaign.

In a Facebook gallery, Gap encouraged fans to express their style and proclaim what they were born to do. Facebook users could also watch a video of Rada Shadick, Gap's "fit engineer," explaining the development of the new denim line.

For the iPhone, Gap's digital agency AKQA created the StyleMixer app that reveals "surprises" when near a Gap store, and lets users mix and match outfits and interact with friends on the Gap Facebook page.

AKQA also created banner ads for different blog partners saying what each was born to do. For example, the ads on glam.com say "Born to Set Trends," and the ads on PopSugar say "Born to Strategize."

Then in November, Gap unveiled its holiday TV spots, including a 30-second ad by Crispin Porter + Bogusky that showed a group of wholesome, jeans-clad dancers stomp-cheering in a white log cabin. They chanted, "Go Christmas, go Hanukkah, go Kwanzaa, go solstice ... Do whatever you wannukkah and to all a cheery night."

Some conservative Christians were not amused by the comparison of Christmas to other holidays and the cavalier attitude of the ad. They complained loudly online and offline, stirring up a brief culture-wars skirmish. "The winter solstice is a pagan celebration, so - viewed through a peculiarly warped lens - the Gap ad puts Christians on the same level as a bunch of blue-painted heathens dancing around a Yule log drinking mead out of a stag horn," wrote Los Angeles Times columnist Dan Neil in mid-November.

The result: On the Gap Facebook page, 49,000 personal cheers, which were a takeoff of the TV ad, had been sent by mid-December. The Facebook page itself grew to 493,000 fans by December 16.

While Levi's jeans and Gap jeans took on politics and religion, if somewhat obliquely, Diesel continued in its predictable quest to shock. For instance, in its 2009 spring-summer men's campaign, the ads included enigmatic scenes such as an elderly foot fetishist worshipping model Jon Kortajarena's Diesel high-top sneakers and a ramshackle apartment filled with cats. The dark mood was reinforced via the black-and-white images shot by John Scarisbrick.

The Diesel ads ran in GQ, Details, Flaunt and Nylon magazines, as well as on billboards in major cities such as New York and Los Angeles.

The campaign was designed to be a hipster take on David Lynch, and "there are no messages, themes or commentary to understand" in the marketing, Diesel creative director Wilbert Das told the fashion press. "Our objective is to intrigue and provoke a thought." It seemed to help the brand keep its cred - by the end of 2009, the Diesel Facebook page had more than 320,000 fans, or 640,000 legs (and feet).