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Levi's "Go Forth" campaign: is it really helping Braddock, PA?

Recently Levi’s opened a new ad campaign featuring the town and citizens of Braddock, Pennsylvania, but is this campaign effective corporate propaganda or corporate philanthropy at its best?

The company’s “Go Forth” campaign is employing the slogan, “We Are All Workers”, as it shows interviews with citizens of Braddock talking about better times as melancholy piano music plays in the background.

Braddock was once a thriving suburb of Pittsburgh with over 20,000 citizens at its peak in the 1950s. A steel mill created jobs for workers, stores were busy, people had money to spend and times were good.

Following the closing of the UPMC Braddock Hospital, the area’s biggest employer in recent years, today only 3,000 people live in Braddock. The site of Andrew Carnegie’s steel mill, Braddock is now just an afterthought in today post-modern American economy, as are many once-thriving small American towns.

It seems that Levi’s understands this and is taking action to help Braddock. Over the next two years they will give Braddock a million dollars to help improve Braddock’s Community Center, Public Library and Urban Farm. Citizens will also be featured in Levi’s ads.

But does the campaign go far enough? After all, when you say “We Are All Workers” for ads featuring American workers and then manufacture less than 3% of your product in America, are you being genuine or are you just trying to exploit a bad situation for your benefit?

Levi’s has brought attention to Braddock, but it hasn’t brought jobs. There are no plans for Levi’s to open a plant in Braddock. Instead Levi’s own site says this about the campaign, “…if they’re just matched with the right distressed consumer brand, distressed Americans are ideal marketing mascots.”

Is that what working Americans have become, marketing mascots? What do you think of Levi’s marketing campaign and how it can affect Braddock, Pennsylvania?