Getting it all wrong

Flicking through a back issue of New Media Age I came across an interesting feature about user-generated content and how Levi were embracing this new phenomenon in their latest campaign - "Antidote".

The article was written back in September last year, so the article was pretty spot on about hyping up user-generated content - as this was around the time when the likes of Google Video and YouTube were starting to fly.

What wasn't so spot on was Levi's digital agency's approach (Lateral) to making the most of this so called new phenomenon work for the brand. By all accounts Antidote is an incredibly good example of how to get brand participation completely wrong.

Levi's main mistakes lie in conceptual, technological and fundamental cultural issues. Conceptually Levi's idea is based around a fairly "closed-wall" approach. There's no - let's help make sh*t happen for anyone who wants it. It is more of a pick and choose approach, which if you're wanting to generate a grass-roots following then you'll just end up pissing the grass roots off.

Technologically Levi's have completely neglected to take into account the idea of mashing-stuff up and facilitation. Instead of creating a platform that brings together the best bits of the web (Flickr, Google Maps etc.) Levi's have pushed out a mediocre Flash-based solution. It looks nice - but functionally is a real turkey.

And finally from a cultural perspective, Levi's just really don't seem to get how to match their brand values to the new "P generation" - where young people want control. Levi's talk about their cultural brand heritage of being all grass-rootsy and wanting to empower people, however their Antidote campaign shows how this is all a bunch of brand lies.

The scary thing for Levi's is that unless they loosen up and really embrace the concept of brand participation from real people, then their brand is going to continue slipping into history.