Levi’s ad campaign: A Provocation, A Challenge, and An Invitation. I suppose one could say Whitman was provoked into accepting an invitation for a challenge when he wrote Leaves of Grass, but other than that I don’t really see the connection to Levi’s jeans. I own a few pairs of Levi’s and it wasn’t because they exploited Whitman’s work. I think Levi’s campaign is a little distorted to say the least. Whitman may have written Leaves of Grass as an answer to Emerson’s The Poet, but it wasn’t an advertisement for poetry. Whitman did not spend a huge amount of his life writing poems because he loved Levi’s.
I’m not saying I didn’t like the advertisements. I thought they were kind of cool. They were inspiring, but in a “I want to run through a field and light off fireworks” kind of way not in a “I need Levi’s jeans” kind of way. It doesn’t really bother me that they used Whitman. I think a lot of people who knew nothing about him previously will unknowingly know something about him after seeing the ad.
As for advertisers playing the cultural roles that poets played in earlier eras…… unh? What? Who said this? Really? Am I crazy? Is there a hidden vault somewhere containing poems written by America’s greatest poets that are all about buying fashionable merchandise? Although there are few left in the world today, there ARE still people who read actual books instead of magazines, poems instead of tabloids, and don’t find cable television a necessity for everyday life.
However, I am in no way saying that advertisers can’t be poetic. Take the mermaid picture for example. A legless mermaid with a pair of jeans… how tragic.
"advertisers playing the cultural roles that poets played in earlier eras" means that poets played cultural roles, not poets were advertisers, and that the roles are reversed now.
ReplyDeleteWell I can't deny that advertiser's do play some sort of cultural role. I just think comparing it to the roles played by poets is kind of stretching it.
ReplyDeleteI was correcting your error in interpreting the statement to begin with.
ReplyDeleteYour insight is intriguing. I do, however, think that Levi's was going with the bigger picture. I think they were trying to go with Whitman's ideas of individualism and freedom of the self, and they were trying to portray that in their advertising.
ReplyDeleteYup, I've got to agree with Amy. Sadly though Levi's is playing on their notoriety for excellence they once had. Not bad, cool picture.
ReplyDeletetragic mermaid indeed.
ReplyDelete