Levi's wants your head

Levi's, not content with having your ass in their products, wants to put your head in their ads.

In this microsite add-on to their current tv campaign, you can upload your face and "be the star" of the ad. Nothing new, Wedding Crashers did the same thing. It was fun the first time in a "stick your head through this hole and have your picture taken as a bodybuilder on the beach" sort of way.

Overall though, I'm perplexed by the whole thing. Is it supposed to bring value to the brand because consumers are engaging with the brand? Is Becky (the face in the image) thinking, "What a cool brand Levi's is for doing this, I think I'm going to buy me a pair of jeans right now!"? This may have been cool the first time with Wedding Crashers, but now it's just a cheesy copycat. Surely Levi's doesn't want to appear to be a novelty chaser.

Maybe the brand thinks this is some kind of consumer-generated media. Unfortunately, it's really not. Lettings consumers upload their face to an ad agency-created commercial is not my idea of tapping into your audience for brand building.

I'm unimpressed. This is such an interesting campaign, they could have had a lot of fun with it. Let's strip down to the bare message here:

• You love your jeans
• You'll do anything to prevent them from being taken
• You look really good in them when you get them back
  

Can you imagine what some creative consumers could do with that if you allowed them to submit their own content? You can't do many pantsless messages with other brands. This was such a great opportunity for people to have fun with Levi's and they totally blew it.