The Politics of Advertising: Levi's
For the third installment of this series, The Politics of Advertising, I will be focusing on an issue that is incredibly prevalent and relevant to today’s political environment - the act of voting. This series as a whole aims to analyse advertisements and see how they’re effectively, or sometimes ineffectively, using social issues to promote products and ideas. It’s important to ask ourselves: What’s being said and what are the intentions behind the messages advertisers throw at us as viewers? At what point does the product overshadow the issue and is it something we should support?
For this particular issue, the focus on voting is relevant. It’s a well known fact that ads can get political, and what could be more political than actual politics itself? With the 2020 election and the Democratic primaries being in full swing, several companies have taken it upon themselves to create advertisements that urge viewers to go out and vote. Such has been the case in previous election cycles, where Lyft came out with discounts for riders that were headed toward the polls. They even created a mural of unused ballots to raise awareness about a lack of voter turnout. One of the main difficulties that people encountered when going out to vote was transportation, so Lyft cleverly decided to take action and have their voting campaign be directly beneficial to its audience. By providing a solution to a problem, in the form of more accessible transportation, their message was coherent and appropriate for the issue at hand.
There are other companies, however, that include the call to action to get people to vote. One such company is Levi’s, an American clothing company best known for its denim jeans. Levi’s came out with the following ad last year, but it has been circulating lately - and fittingly - during commercial breaks on streaming sites like Hulu and ABC.
We begin with a person entering a voting centre with red, white, and blue balloons - our first indication that this ad is fitting to the current U.S. political climate. But worry not, this ad is apparently not taking place just in the U.S. We see images of an impoverished town, followed by somewhere in the Middle East perhaps (due to the Arabic written on the side of one of the featured buildings). There’s rural areas, urban areas, all filled with people waking up, putting on their burqas, and travelling to the polls. They’re voting - they’re filling out ballots and getting their ‘I Voted’ stickers. But what’s more important than that? In case you missed it, they’re all wearing Levi’s denim jeans or jackets. As we all know, it would be impossible to complete a civic duty like voting without the help of Levi’s sturdy denim on our bodies.
In terms of audience, it’s a little tricky to gauge who exactly this is directed to. While there is an emphasis on the United States - because of the use of the red white and blue, the ‘I Voted’ stickers, and the fact that most everything is in English - there’s also a lot of interjections that feature countries that are not the United States where men and women are separated to get in line to vote (00:13). Uniting very different cultures under the guise of American style politics is ineffective because the very act of voting is being presented as an empowering and liberating experience. This is only emphasised through the use of the song “Freedom” throughout the entirety of the ad. This ad completely misses the mark with its lack of focus, and treating voting as a universal process that emulates the United States is ignorant to say the least.
In terms of effectiveness, they have definitely tried to somehow link two things that otherwise would have no connection whatsoever. In no political climate is voting linked to the wearing of denim, making the ad as a whole rather weak. There’s also a general sense of forced inclusivity. While the showing of diversity is definitely important in the advertising world, it comes off as tone deaf to have the United States’ voting culture imposed in places where freedom (as the song suggests) is not guaranteed. There is the underlying assumption that everyone gets to vote and that everyone is guaranteed accessibility to voting stations.
If the empowerment that comes along with voting is something that companies want to capitalise on, it needs to be done with more care and in a way in which the viewer can see the direct link between the product and the social issue that is being pushed. Free or discounted rides to the polls will actually empower citizens to go out and vote. Denim? Not so much.
