Planner Reads

Wieden + Kennedy uses the words of Walt Whitman in their current work for Levi's (the "America" and "Pioneer" spots in the "Go Forth" campaign).  They actually use Whitman's voice as well, recovering it from wax cylinders from the 1880s.

At first, it feels presumptuous.  Whitman is perhaps the American poet.  He helped grasp what America was and fashion the ideas that made it something we could think.  It is not too much to say he helped found America.  To see his language and voice leveraged for commercial purposes, is at first a little breathtaking. 

Whitman described himself this way: "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest."  (Leaves of Grass)

If there is a brand that can claim these meanings for itself, it is Levi's.  Almost everything about the brand history and heritage gives it this opportunity…too rarely taken up.  The W+K spots do a nice job of evoking these meanings.  (Hats off to Susan Hoffman, the executive creative director of W+K, and Cary Fukunaga who directed "America" ...