The Butt Heard Round the World: Levi's "Rear View" Video Is Exquisitely Cynical
Levi Strauss & Co.'s "Rear View Girls" video got 7.4 million views on YouTube between Feb 14 and Feb. 25 (video below). That's an amazing viral coup. But the film -- in which an "ass cam" shows how many people on the streets of Los Angeles check out a girl's butt as she walks around -- doesn't showcase the product or mention the brand. The video isn't particularly sexy or interesting to watch, either. And Levi's says it doesn't know how it will translate the thing into sales.
So why is it so successful? Although the video appears to be funny and titillating, it's actually a fantastically cynical exercise in doing what women's apparel brands do best: Make women women feel bad about their bodies, and paranoid about who's looking at them.
Levi's says it's on women's side:
"The aim of this campaign is for people to connect with the brand and walk away feeling good about their body,'' said Levi Strauss senior director of public relations Alexa Rudin. ''We need to look at how we convert that into sales. We have to be strategic and long term about it.''
But is it? The video was made by New Zealand ad agency Colenso BBDO for Levi's Curve ID range for "curvy women." But the women in the video aren't curvy at all. They're stick-thin models.In addition, a disproportionate number of folks caught gawking at the girls' butts are riding behind them on escalators. In that scenario, the butt in front of you is at eye-level whether you like it or not. The "ass cam" itself pokes through a hole in the back of the jeans, so it would be surprising if it didn't attract attention on a moving stairway.
Lastly, while some guys -- OK, a lot of guys -- are certainly caught checking out Reanin Johannink and Jess Gurunathan's rears, a lot of the "gotcha" shots are fairly ambiguous. Does looking vaguely at the back of someone count as checking out their butt? One might draw the opposite conclusion, that men are often surprisingly discreet about eyeballing women in public.
The bottom line -- ouch! -- is that this is a manipulation: It's a setup designed to give women the impression that backsides face a lot more scrutiny than perhaps they actually do in real life. The fact that it's gotten so big, so quickly suggests that it has tapped that fear with exquisite precision. (Can it be long before Victoria's Secret brings us "boob cam"?)
On the other hand: Bravo, Levi's. In 2010 the company created one of the best ads of the year, another viral video titled "Guy walks across America," which has had 2.7 million views in more than six months. "Rear View Girls" tops that by a country mile. Sales also rose 7 percent to $4.3 billion at the retailer last year. Clearly, something is finally going right at this company.
- UPDATE: The video appears to have been pulled "because its contents violated YouTube's terms of service."
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