Levi's Super Bowl Ad Draws Criticism

By Skip Wollenberg

Associated Press

Levi Strauss Co. upset some television viewers with its edgy Super Bowl commercial showing medics rushing a pair of jeans from their fallen owner to a sickly recipient.

The world's biggest jeans maker owes an apology to people awaiting an organ transplant for making light of a significant health problem, said Jon Eiche, executive director of the organ donor registration organization The Living Bank, based in Houston.

He asked that the ad be pulled at once.

A Levi Strauss spokeswoman said Wednesday the company didn't mean to offend anyone with the ad and has no plans to run it again. It was run at least twice this past Sunday on the CBS telecast of the Super Bowl and on cable television later that night.

The ad showed an unconscious man who had fallen from a carousel horse. A team of medics approaches him and finds he has a jeans donor card. They take his pants, put them in a cooler like ones often used to transport human organs and take the package by helicopter to a man found cowering in his bedroom. The man dons the pants and seems elated to have them.

Spokeswoman Kendra Gourvitz of Levi Strauss in San Francisco said the ad was meant in fun "to show how people are so attached to their jeans."

The commercial promoted Levi's "Re-Issued 569" jeans that are designed to look as if they have already been worn.

Gourvitz said the company has gotten a "modest number of calls" about the ad but declined to say how many. She said the calls ranged from those who loved it to those who said they "didn't appreciate that kind of humor."

One woman who identified herself as an organ transplant recipient told the company in an e-mail that she "got a chuckle out of the ad" and hoped it would generate awareness and open a dialogue about the issue of organ transplants, Gourvitz said.

She said one of the people who worked as an art director and copywriter on the ad from the ad agency TBWA/Chiat Day was an organ recipient himself.

But Eiche said more than 74,000 people are on a national waiting list for an organ transplant, and 16 of them die each day because an organ is not available to them.

"To parody this issue in a TV commercial is very insensitive," he said.

The Living Bank, a nonprofit organization, has been registering organ and tissue donors for over 32 years.

Copyright © 2001 Associated Press.

This article posted February 16, 2001.