Odyssey
Levi's Engineered Jeans2002
Odyssey is a 2002 60-second television and cinema commercial for Levi's Engineered Jeans, created by Bartle Bogle Hegarty, London.
The line
Freedom to move.
Why it works
A man and a woman sprint through wall after wall of a building — plaster exploding around them — then out into a forest, up two trees, and into the night sky, to Handel's Sarabande. No voiceover, no product shot beyond the clothes they're wearing. Jonathan Glazer's 2002 film for BBH, reportedly the most expensive ad Levi's had made at £2.5m, is studied as commercial filmmaking at the edge of cinema: a single metaphor (jeans as freedom from constraint) rendered with total conviction, intimate handheld camera inside an impossible stunt, and classical music where youth marketing demanded beats. It won a Cannes Gold Lion and a One Show Gold Pencil, and sales of the Engineered Jeans line were reported up 200% after it broke.
Techniques
- Pathos Sends a couple sprinting through wall after wall and up into the night sky, turning the jeans into an exhilarating feeling of freedom from constraint.
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