Hasta La Creative!

Writing in More About Advertising, Stephen Foster says Levi’s has “lightened up” with a follow up to the Wieden + Kennedy-created opus, Go Forth Braddock. That spot, if you recall, pulled the heartstrings by focusing on American despair and how that despair, so says the commercial, motivates people to work towards a goal. Idealistic is an understatement.

The agency’s new work, This is a Pair of Levi’s, is far from a “lightening up” of the original. In fact, it pours on the hipsterific poetics as if the entire world suddenly and collectively participated in a gigantic hand-waving, come-to-Jesus beatnik meeting of epic proportion.

As a collection of citified youngsters prepare for the day, a voiceover amps up the rhetoric with anthem-like intensity that likens the mundane act of going to work to…oh…landing a rover on Mars.

It’s preposterously stupid and laughable. But when you’re sitting around a conference room table high on Starbucks with your heart racing from that team-wide Agency.com-style group fist bump you all experienced before walking in to the client presentation…this shit is awesome!

At one point, the voiceover intones, “It’s the thread in your seams that’s tied to your dreams.” That was the punchline, right? That’s when we’re supposed to laugh at this epic inside joke, right?

Right?

Right?

Boom! This…is a pair of Levi’s.

Remember when Levi’s where just a pair of jeans?

And the Braddock opus:

In the world of advertising it’s pretty much written in stone that brands portray their products in an aspirational manner using imagery and actors that are everything a consumer wants to be but can’t because they aren’t rich enough, beautiful enough, skinny enough, own a fancy enough car, have big enough breasts or a six pack that puts Calvin Klein models to shame.

Which is why we love this new Southern Comfort work from Wieden + Kennedy New York. Called Whatever’s Comfortable, it’s a celebration of just that. No pretense here at all. Just a not so perfect looking guy walking down the beach with all the calm collected coolness that only…ahem…comfort with one’s own body can bring.

A :90 version of the commercial is currently running on Southern Comfort’s Facebook page and YouTube channel and a :60 will air on television, a first for the brand, beginning August 5.

Minus any voiceover or copy, the spot is set to the tune of Odetta’s Hit or Miss. The work is Wieden + Kennedy’s first since winning the account from Arnold which had handled the brand since 2001.

Dow is having a whole lot of fun with its Hopeiary dude, a sort of bush man, who wanders around London representing the planet’s Olympic dream; that humans don’t kill it with their environmental carelessness.

Doritos UK recently launched For Fun Add A Little Mexican, a campaign which features the band, Mariachi Doritos.

In new Heineken work that includes shades of Twin Peaks, TBWA\NEBOKO is out with The Switch, part of the brand’s global Open Your World campaign.

Finding your authentic brand’s story is not a luxury for the touchy-feely. Given our overloaded channels of communication and the general lack of trust (and boredom) with advertising messages, finding your brand’s true emotional core and expressing it through your brand’s story is a must.

DDB UK is out with new work for VW’s See Film Differently campaign which supports independent cinema.

Today Visa, with help from TBWA\Chiat\Day, has launched a new campaign that invites people around the world to cheer for their favorite Olympic athlete.

Marketer has to eat crow after no one imagined they could possibly be behind the stunt.

Tennis pro Mardy Fish teamed with Bumble Bee to create a a video documentary chronicling his quest for a healthy lifestyle