Alicia Keys, who prompted any number of “Creative Director is meaningless” think pieces when doomed phone company BlackBerry gave her that title back in 2013, has returned to her previous role as pop star and spokesperson in the new FCB campaign for Levi’s.
FCB won the account from W+K back in 2014 and moved away from the former’s Bukowksi-tinged existentialism by running a campaign focused on the “personal relationship” between each pair of jeans and its owner. The “Live in Levi’s” work insisted that these titular pants be anything but boring, and Keys makes good on that promise, telling Vanessa Friedman of The New York Times:
“My personal jeans slogan is, ‘If it ain’t tight, it ain’t right.’ It’s my motto. [But Levi’s] can’t use it.”
Advertisement
That’s cool, though: the line for the new campaign, promoting the company’s women’s denim collection, is “For Every Woman. For Every Original,” which is probably a better fit for super-snug jeans.
Some more details on the campaign: the new products are more elastic in order to compete with “the rise of the athleisure phenomenon,” aka Lululemon. The series will also feature more musicians in future materials, and it marks “the brand’s biggest investment in any female-oriented ads” in its history.
This new look comes from more than two years spent polling women from Chicago to Shanghai and offers the consumer “larger back pockets, for more flattering optics” in addition to the aforementioned elasticity.
Keys claims that these changes are part of what drew her to the new sponsorship gig and admits to the Times that she experimented with other brands before coming back to Levi’s, kind of like how she experimented with sending a BlackBerry promo tweet from her iPhone and then blamed “hackers.”
The ad above will air on TV and in theaters starting today; it’s already made the rounds on various blogs. AKQA will handle digital content.