Let’s say you’re a Hollywood producer. You’ve got a film in development, a depressing little post-apocalyptic number called The Road,Unfortunately, when shopping for
cheap true religion you must be aware that there are faux. and you’re looking around the U.S. for promisingly gloomy locations when somebody tells you about this place in western Pennsylvania called Braddock. It’s easy enough to reach, maybe a 20-minute drive from downtown Pittsburgh, so you pay a visit and discover a magnificently rundown sliver of a town, a scruffy landscape of boarded-up storefronts and abandoned houses that time itself seems to have left behind.
You’re not the first to be attracted by Braddock’s blight, and you won’t be the last. In early 2010, almost two years after The Road crew wrapped its work here, the few citizens of Braddock watch as another West Coast crew rolls their trucks and gear and ideas along the battered streets, this time with the intention of filming Braddock not as a stand-in for a nightmare but as its own complicated self. The creatives are from Wieden + Kennedy, a hot-shot ad agency out of Portland, Ore., that’s also in the midst of refreshing the Old Spice brand, and they’ve convinced their clients at Levi Strauss & Co. that Braddock should be the focal point of an audacious $55-million (U.S.) advertising campaign.
In an era of high unemployment and diminishing national hopes, Levi’s intends to hearken back to a similarly dim time in American history as a way of illuminating the future. Built on the theme of “work,” with declarations like “Everybody’s Work is Equally Important” and “We Are All Workers,” the campaign evokes the Depression-era photographs of Dorothea Lange and the handmade aesthetic of the Works Progress Administration, the Roosevelt administration’s mammoth public works effort that helped put the United States back on its feet almost 80 years ago.
But this campaign won’t just use the town as a backdrop; it will sell the new Levi’s line of men’s work wear by selling the story of Braddock and its people. Local folk will be depicted as America’s “new pioneers,” rolling up their denim sleeves to build a new life for their town. Their images will be used in a TV and movie theatre ad shot by The Road director John Hillcoat and slapped on magazine spreads and billboards across North America. They will talk to the cameras of independent filmmaker Aaron Rose, and see their life stories transformed into a documentary posted on YouTube and airing on the Sundance Channel in the U.S. They will become the face of the brand. And Levi Strauss will do something else: it will tie itself to Braddock’s fate, donating $1-million to a local non-profit created to improve the quality of life, and tracking the effects of its philanthropy in hopes that it can help write a new chapter in the town’s history.
Levi’s, of course, is trying to revive its own fortunes. Once the No. 1 denim jean brand, with 30 per cent of the market, it has been on a decades-long slide. It failed to anticipate the premium jeans market, and abandoned the positioning that had fused its identity with the origin myth of American pioneers. The Braddock initiative looks to the future by embracing its own past.
If you scan the store shelves these days, it can sometimes feel as if brands are more interested in raising money for causes than in making and selling products. Stock up on toilet paper and you may be donating to the fight against cancer; buy some chocolate and you’re helping build a school in Ghana. More than ever, companies are trying to leverage the emotional equity embedded in a cause to help them form a deeper connection with consumers. And at the same time, people have bought into the argument that they can effect change more easily as consumers than as citizens. (Even the anti-consumption publication Adbusters has spoken of the need to “vote with your dollars.”) A study released this week by the Boston-based consulting firm Cone found that 81 per cent of Americans would like to have the opportunity to buy a cause-related product, up from 75 per cent just two years ago.
One of the largest such efforts is the Pepsi Refresh Project, a $25-million program funding small organizations across North America. Last month the Canadian division of Kia Motors rolled out “Drive Change,” a campaign based on unexpected acts of kindness, such as sending crews to build a community garden at an east-end Toronto housing project.
The Levi’s campaign, which evokes a time when government responsibility to its citizens was being wholly re-imagined, is especially rich and tangled. With the U.S. government either unable, because of its choking debt, or unwilling to play the resuscitative role it once did, Levi’s is trying to assume the role of guardian angel. “It is the responsibility of brands that believe in things to actually act on them, and act as the beacon that they can if the government can’t step in,” suggests Danielle Flagg, one of three Wieden creative directors on the Levi’s account.
But the same democratic impulses that push companies into embracing causes on behalf of their customers can bite those corporations, too. As soon as the Levi’s campaign rolled out, critics sniggered that its use of historical American iconography was illegitimate: the company’s blue jeans are now manufactured entirely offshore.
“I believe it’s in their best interest to actually become a working class product,” offers Brett Banditelli, an aspiring Braddock-area labour activist. “Right now they’re pretending, basically.” Many, both in and out of town, suggested that if Levi’s really wanted to help the town, it should build a factory here.
This sort of thing is exasperating for John Fetterman, Braddock’s mayor. “I just don’t see how anyone could have a problem with it, and if they do, look around your own home and your closet: Where’s all your stuff made?” he asks. “I wish it would be made in America, I know for a fact Levi’s wants to make it in America, but your American consumer says, ‘Buy American,’ and they spend it all on stuff that’s made in China.”
The seed for the new campaign was planted last fall, when someone at Wieden noted that Mr. Fetterman had been named one of the Atlantic Monthly’s 25 “Brave Thinkers.” Beefy, bald, and about 6 feet, 8 inches tall – he describes himself as looking “like a washed-up professional wrestler” – Mr. Fetterman, 41, is an unlikely champion of a town whose population has dwindled over the decades from more than 20,000 to less than 3,000.
His only official duties involve scheduling the 14-person local police force that patrols the approximately one square kilometre comprising Braddock. (For this, he receives a salary of $150 a month; he is financially supported by his father, who owns a commercial insurance agency in central Pennsylvania.) But he punches far above the weight of his office, due in about equal measure to a masters degree from the Kennedy School of Government and the tattoos you glimpse as soon as you sit down to chat: Braddock’s zip code, 15104, is emblazoned along the inside of his left forearm, while his right arm carries the dates of the five local homicides that have occurred since he won office in 2005. (The last, he notes with some pride, occurred more than two years ago.) He has landed coverage in The New York Times and on CBS, a pair of appearances on The Colbert Report, and a speaker’s perch at influential forums like the PopTech Conference and the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Mr. Fetterman came to Braddock in 2001 with his master’s degree in public policy economics as an AmeriCorps volunteer to establish an employment training program for at-risk teens. He threw his lot in with the town two years later, spending a few thousand dollars on a deconsecrated, dilapidated church on Library Street, then ascended in 2005 to the mayor’s office after winning the Democratic primary by one vote. (He ran unopposed in the general election.)
He was re-elected last year in a landslide victory; some of his signs, which read “Keep Change,” bore a 2007 picture of himself and Barack Obama, whom he supported during the Pennsylvania presidential primary. Almost one year later, some buildings here – even the squatters’ dens with tattered sheets flapping behind broken windows – still bear election campaign bumper stickers touting “JKF,” a wink to the notion that many in Braddock regard him as a John F. Kennedy-style saviour.
“Braddock was the prototypical, completely self-contained community,” says Mr. Fetterman, explaining how, back in the middle of the last century, it was the commercial centre for many of the nearby steel towns along the Monongehela Valley “Had multiple breweries, drugstores, barber shops – 14 furniture stores in an area this size. It’s remarkable, you know? It’s like the Titanic: It was too big to fail, it was indestructible, and it ended up at the bottom of the ocean, and nobody could have seen it coming.”
Mr. Fetterman is standing now on Library Street, in front of that old church he bought in ’03. You can trace the last 120 years of American philanthropy right here. To your right is the Levi’s-sponsored community centre, recently renovated with a new roof, new electrical system and a gorgeously restored stained-glass window; to the left is a hulking Romanesque pile that,,Our company has opened five years, we have our own shops.
women handbags in 1889, opened as the first Carnegie Library in the U.S. Andrew Carnegie paid for it out of the profits of his first steel mill, which is still operating a few blocks away, at the east end of Braddock Avenue. (Noting that none of the mill men lives in Braddock, Mr. Fetterman says it is “only really a source of pollution and noise.”) When the library opened, its public spaces included a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a billiards room, and a splendid mid-sized auditorium known as the first Carnegie Hall. Most of those rooms are now shuttered for want of cash.
Mr. Fetterman’s solace is that Braddock has likely fallen as far as it can: the town’s only remaining large employer, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, closed its hospital here earlier this year, taking more than 600 jobs with it. (One woman noted sourly that UPMC even yanked its shrubbery out of the landscaping.)
Which is one reason this story has no easy answers. “Corporations now – and to some extent, they deserve it – have a bad reputation,” Mr. Fetterman says. Still, “within three months of the largest non-profit in the state bailing on the community – UPMC, an $8-billion company, which doesn’t pay taxes because they’re supposed to provide health care to those who need it – Levi’s stepped in and has done this. So I think if anything, you don’t know who wears the white hats and you don’t know who wears the black hats any more. That’s how you could tell the good guys from the bad guys.”
“No one else was stepping in,” he adds.,We supply cheap gucci,cheap lv,
nike af1 etc. “And furthermore, if the R.K. Mellon Foundation said, ‘John, here’s a million dollars, go fix up [something]’– well, where did they get their money from?”
Deanne Dupree, 23, had been a UPMC housekeeper for four years when she was laid off, so it was serendipity when she ran into Mr. Fetterman in April. He said he might have some work for her, and told her to go to the Elks Lodge. There, alongside hundreds of others, she told the casting folks from Wieden + Kennedy about her life: about how there was nothing to do when she was growing up in Braddock, about her 18-month-old daughter Demi, about Demi’s father Radee Berry, whose murder in a back-alley gun battle is immortalized in the last line on Mr. Fetterman’s right forearm.
Right now, she sits shyly in the cramped living room of her grandmother’s new senior’s residence apartment on Braddock Avenue, her gold necklace that reads “Taken” in a delicate gold cursive glinting in the light. Her grandmother proudly shows off a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette press clipping about the campaign and boasts of friends telling her they saw her granddaughter on billboards. “I’m lovin’ this,” says the older woman. “I’ve been telling her for years she should have been a model.”
That always seemed too remote, but Ms. Dupree is hoping the Levi’s work could springboard into something else. “Somebody from Levi’s told John’s wife that they have a surprise for me,” she says. “They know I want to be a model, so I’m hoping it’s something that pertains to that.” So far, though, she hasn’t heard anything. “I’m just being patient. I might receive phone calls months from now. People in New York might say, ‘Who’s that girl?’ “ She giggles at the prospect. “‘How can we contact her?’”
After he and his six-year-old son Jarral were featured in the campaign, Anthony Price, 24, has been mulling a move into modelling, too, but he knows he should focus on getting work related to the degree he got last year in computer business management. It’s been a tough slog looking for work, but then, it wasn’t easy growing up in Braddock’s housing projects,This is the best Ed Hardy Clothing Shop,providing high quality
Ed hardy clothing ,Ed Hardy T-Shirts,Ed Hardy Shoes,Ed Hardy Jeans,Ed Hardy Hoodies,bags,etc. either. “I have faith,” he says. “I hope (the campaign) may open up another opportunity for me in life. I think it will.” If not, he adds, he has the package of photographs and magazine ads Levi’s sent him, and the memories of working with his son.
In the meantime, Ms. Dupree has landed another housekeeping job at one of UPMC’s hospitals in downtown Pittsburgh. It means a long bus ride each day, but it’s work, and her daughter is depending on her. As she accepts a lift into Pittsburgh from Braddock one recent morning, Ms. Dupree mentions that Levi’s paid her $750 for about a week of shoots and interviews, which helped tide her over between jobs. Then she catches herself. “Do Levi’s get to read this article?” She is concerned, she says, about revealing how much she was paid. “I mean, I don’t want them to think I’m not grateful.”
