Levi's has been a very strong post-advertiser in the past six months, but most of its campaigns targeted the male jeans wearer. Now Levi's has trained its post-advertising sites on the fairer sex in an interesting content partnership with Glam Media.
Levi.Glam.com is a content microsite sponsored and partially created by Levi's. The site features denim style videos starrying real-world fashionistas, a jeans matchmaking quiz and jeans tips. Let's go through our little post-advertising check list:
1. Authority: Levi's definitely has authority to talk about women's fashion.
2. Media: By partnering with Glam.com, the flagship of a ring of female-centric media sites, Levi's found a partner with publishing expertise that could help it create custom, relevant content for the audience it wanted to engage. In the post-advertising age, brands are turning themselves into media companies, but some brands are finding it easy and effective to partner with existing media companies to effect this transition.
3. Storytelling: The stories of Levi's wearers and their Levi's habits are not exactly "Great Expectations," but they do well at interesting an audience while also serving the brand.
4. Authenticity: Though I'm not in the market for skinny jeans, there's a little something about this content that irks me. The interviewees in the denim styling series videos seem a bit too much in the tank for Levi's, though...
5. Receptivity: ...this is perhaps expected. A lot of fashion/beauty content is thinly veiled advertorial. And I think the audience understands and accepts this. For instance, the editorial pages of Cosmo and Glamour are loaded with Great New Products Just for You! And many readers read those magazines to look at the ads anyway. So I think the authenticity problems for someone like me—not used to consuming this type of content—and the receptivity problems they might create, are actually mitigated by the type of content.
Other Levi's post-advertising campaigns from this year:
- Monkeying around
- Sex in other peoples' apartments
- Male models gettin' crazy
- Levi's drops trow