Walt Whitman's voice

It's a dark ad--it's using images of post-Katrina New Orleans, and images that make us think of the bank failures, to sell us something.  And generally the message of the ad is something like "we're Americans, we've been through worse and we'll rise about this," which is usually a message that makes me bristle (do we really think there's something particularly American about persevering through adversity?).  But here, I don't mind so much: I love the artistry of this ad, and the idea that that creaky old recording is Whitman's--WALT WHITMAN, the father of American poetry--just takes my breath away.  This is exactly the situation where we have to be careful as consumers, though.  I am at the very center of their target demographic for this ad; it works on me.

There's a good essay by ad critic Seth Stevenson about this ad, arguing that as a centuries-old U.S.-based company, Levi's has a right to use the concept of America in a way that other companies don't:  http://www.slate.com/id/2233597/