Hey, remember that weird period Levi's went through in the summer of 98 where they thought they could sell jeans using a dead hamster? What a time it was to be alive.
Back in the late 1990s, jeans were undergoing something of an image problem, with young people widely dismissing them as clothing for their parents' generation. Denim sales were in decline, and the rising popularity of own-brand clothing lines over designer labels wasn't helping any. Levi's urgently needed to win back the youth market by demonstrating that they were radical, hip and cutting edge. And what could be more radical, hip and cutting edge than an advert featuring a dead hamster?
As it turned out, the general public didn't exactly share Levi's somewhat idiosyncratic manner of thinking, and their "Kevin the Hamster" ad went on to become one of the most controversial in UK advertising history when it was played extensively over a select weekend in August 1998. The Independent Television Commission received 544 complaints, then a record, regarding the ad, which depicts a hamster losing his zest for life after his beloved exercise wheel malfunctions and succumbing to a fatal boredom. Many of these complaints were made on behalf of children who were upset by Kevin's odd and disturbing demise, while others simply couldn't see what the death of a small, fluffy and totally innocuous animal had to do with the product in question and considered it little more than exercise in bad taste.
Contrary to popular belief, the Kevin ad was never officially "banned", although ITC did rule that future airings of the advert should not take place before watershed hours. Levi's marketing director Amanda Le Roux claimed that this was all moot anyway, as the advert had only ever been slated to air over that one weekend. She also claimed that the campaign had been extensively researched and that test audiences had absolutely adored the hamster ad. Kevin the hamster himself was even trotted out publicly, with owner Trevor Smith confirming that he was "alive and well and very loved", and that he was now being heavily-sought after for appearances in future advertising campaigns and TV shows. I doubt that many of the 544 who complained did so because they thought that Kevin had actually perished in the making of the ad, but I presume that the idea was to give peace of mind to the children who'd been brought to tears by his apparent demise. (Of course, hamster lifespans being as short as they are, Kevin would certainly be long-passed by the time of writing. I'd be curious to know if he did make any further media appearances within his lifetime.)
The clue to understanding this rather baffling and unsettling ad is in the "original" part of the brand name that appears at the end. It was part of a wider campaign, devised by advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, built around deliberately weird and surreal situations, which hinted toward a vague kind of theme about originality and the importance of thinking outside of the box. In some cases the theme was cleverly applied and executed - notably, an ad directed by Gore Verbinski featuring a small boy beating a shape sorter, literally and figuratively, by hammering a square peg through a round slot. In other cases the originality link seemed far more tenuous - one featured a man, naked from the waist down, riding up a mall escalator, while another centred upon a man who's claim to originality was through his polygamy (he had six wives). Kevin, by contrast, appears to be a far more cautionary example - he dies precisely because he fails to think outside of the box and to adapt to life without his wheel (although in his defence, he is a hamster living in an otherwise barren cage - what else is he supposed to do for entertainment?). Or maybe the whole "original" thing was just an excuse to throw some random nonsense together in a deliberate effort to catch the viewer off guard. Everybody in the late 90s was doing it - Guinness churned out a few real oddities with their "not everything in black and white makes sense" campaign and until I started researching for this article, I had falsely remembered the "six wives" ad as hailing from a similarly peculiar campaign for Irn-Bru (an inevitable risk whenever the precise content of your advertisement isn't clearly linked to the product that you're selling).
One thing that I can definitely say in favour of "Kevin" is that I never forgot it, and ever since that fateful summer of 1998 (like many a young person at that time, a highlight of my Friday night was sneaking into the spare room to watch South Park, then enjoying its first UK terrestrial TV run on Channel 4, without my parents' knowing) the fate of poor Kevin the Hamster remained permanently etched into my brain and continued to haunt me for long after. It was strange and unpredictable and, certainly, I had never seen anything quite like it before. Still, contrary to the ethos of this entire campaign, mere originality isn't everything, and in my opinion it's easy to see how Levi's were setting themselves up with this one.
If we're to assess the advert purely in terms of its weirdness factor, then "Kevin" does strike a number of highly effective notes. There are multiple unsettling elements at play here, from the eerie flatness of the voice-over narration to the off-screen presence controlling the pencil movements at the end, coupled with the gruesome rigor mortis exhibited by the hamster corpse (yes, I know that's really a stuffed specimen) as it topples over. No question that it's an extremely quirky and eye-popping piece of advertising, but unfortunately it's not a particularly likeable one on top of that. It's sufficiently unorthodox, but also rather mean-spirited, and the overall vibe seems to be one of attention-seeking via shock tactics than anything else. As a statement in encouraging consumers to view their brand differently, Levi's August 1998 campaign was a bold curiosity, but ultimately a little too loosely-defined in its weirdness to cement much of a fresh identity, and the "originality" concept far too abstract to translate into a particularly resonant message about why wearing this specific brand of jeans was cool. Even if the story of a hamster who perishes from lack of stimulation had somehow been more clearly linked to Levi's product, it seems unlikely that such an ad would have gone down a treat with all tastes regardless.
Kevin the Hamster proved to be something of a misstep for Levi's, but they rebounded the following year after teaming up with an odd yellow puppet named Flat Eric, and a classic campaign (not to mention a hit single) was born. As for Kevin, his legacy in having inspired the biggest number of complaints made to ITC over a television advertisement was finally usurped in 2003 by an advert for chewing gum in which a man is seen to vomit up a live mongrel. The little guy lives on, however, in that every time I pass the Levi's at my local shopping outlet, my train of thought inevitably seems to wander back to him. I still find it rather baffling to think that a dead hamster was ever expected to translate into increased jeans sales, but if Levi's really wanted to be the designer brand that I associated with a dead hamster, then mission accomplished.
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