Levi’s young, mobile, and media agnostic target craves authenticity and relevance. Levi’s needed to speak to this consumer in the distinct cultural voice of the iconic fashion brand and do so at any given time. We needed a media channel to showcase the brand’s impactful imagery on-the-go and give Levi’s a platform to speak to consumers through its curated editorial content – all while giving fans the innovation they’ve come to expect from Levi’s.

Strategy

Understanding the increase in smartphone use and digital magazine consumption, we connected with a passionate, mobile fashion style community. We wanted to use technology in a new way that brought the brand’s full-page, high impact fashion imagery to life with deeper content experiences through their phones.

Idea

We collaborated with Flipboard, an app that aggregates social and professional content dynamically into a beautiful digital magazine with over nine million monthly users create the first-ever “shoppable” magazine. High impact imagery was inserted into nine major publication’s editorial sections on Flipboard. Those images created “The Levi’s Magazine,” a rich, custom digital experience that tied to a point-of-sale, allowing for full ecommerce capabilities without ever leaving the Flipboard app.

Flipboard created a Levi’s content section which lived within a promoted tile on the app’s home page for two months. The section included photos, editorial and social content from Levi’s various owned media properties, as well as advertorials from the Fall 2012 campaign and shoppable looks, which could be added to the cart within the app experience and seamlessly purchased.

In conjunction with the launch of the “shoppable” magazine, we ran full-page ads with nine Flipboard publications including Vanity Fair, Details, Glamour, ESPN, Fast Company, and more. A call-to-action on the ads directed readers to the “shoppable magazine” and readers were able to navigate within the Levi’s section to designated men’s and women’s shoppable collections. Levi’s content was fully sharable across all social networks and the products were shoppable via integration with the levi.com ecommerce engine.

Results

Levi’s paid integration reached nearly 4 million Flipboard readers and generated nearly 1.8 million flips (digital page turns) within the “shoppable” magazine, leading to more than 160,000 clicks to the ecommerce experience. Levi’s content appeared in Flipboard users’ personalized news feeds in the cover stories section, retweets of the Levi’s “Inside Flipboard” blog posting, and over a dozen articles written about the “shoppable” magazine - garnering over 1,150 retweets, comments and shares.

With ESPN, we co-created a series of videos with then-unknown Russell Wilson that followed his “Go Forth” journey into his rookie season as an National Football League quarterback. After our deal was signed, he was selected as starting quarterback and our vignette debuted to an audience of millions as a :60 spot on Monday Night Football, which also ran on ESPN’s digital and social platforms.

The partnership with HitRECord mirrored a long tradition of Levi’s collaboration with the artistic community. HitRECOrd, an online collaborative music artistic community run by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. No standard media ran as we chose to empower the community to do what it loves while evangelizing the “Go Forth” spirit of the brand.

We also worked with MTV’s “Power of 12” to create authentic, unbiased and informational resources for crucial youth voters. The partnership lived on-air and online in various forms including an engaging fantasy election.

Levi’s paid integration reached nearly 4 million Flipboard readers and generated nearly 1.8 million flips (digital page turns) within the “shoppable” magazine, leading to more than 160,000 clicks to the ecommerce experience. Levi’s content appeared in Flipboard users’ personalized news feeds in the cover stories section, retweets of the Levi’s “Inside Flipboard” blog posting, and over a dozen articles written about the “shoppable” magazine - garnering over 1,150 retweets, comments and shares.

Levi's announced strong earnings in Q1 of 2013 and attributed the success in part to the current global marketing and media efforts.