Inside Levi’s and TBWA’s cultural comeback with the Super Bowl, Beyoncé and a return to denim’s roots

The San Francisco 49ers are celebrating their 80th year in 2026 — nearly 180 years after the discovery of gold in Coloma, California, set off the Gold Rush. The NFL team was named after the fortune seekers who flooded California from 1848 to 1852, helping swell the state’s population by roughly 236,000.

But not everyone came to California looking for gold. Some, like businessman Levi Strauss, saw opportunity elsewhere. In 1873, Strauss partnered with tailor Jacob Davis to patent a design Davis developed to reinforce work pants with copper rivets, giving rise to the modern blue jean.

In the century and a half since, Levi’s has become an American cultural fixture, worn by everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Bruce Springsteen and Steve Jobs.

Then, in 2024, Beyoncé herself released a song, “Levii’s Jeans,” a track from Cowboy Carter. She said the song “celebrates what I believe is the ultimate Americana uniform — something we all wear with pride.”

Levi’s seized the moment, turning the connection into a broader campaign that revisited some of the most iconic advertising through a female lens — part of a larger effort to reconnect the 178-year-old brand with its roots in originality and progress.

In a recent conversation, Rachel Sundberg, senior director of global brand marketing at Levi’s, and Erin Riley, CEO of TBWA, discussed how the Beyoncé partnership came together, why Levi’s looked to its past to move the brand forward and how they think about turning major cultural moments into lasting momentum.

Erin Riley: When we started working together, Levi’s was well known as the uniform for rebellion. It was obviously category-defining for denim, but the brand’s momentum had slowed a bit. We needed to make sure that iconic heritage was translating into desirability and sales today. How was the brand approaching this challenge?

Rachel Sundberg: We knew that Levi’s didn’t need a reinvention and felt that we just needed to get much closer with what had always made us iconic and really reacquaint ourselves with that territory. So together with your team, we started to shape that point of view through a Disruption Day; and we explored every avenue of the brand, its history, where it wanted to go, and what came out of that was this reacquaintance with why we started. Levi’s exists because miners needed stronger apparel to do their work and our founders added rivets to the corners of the pockets of their work pants. And that origin story signaled to us this journey from that point forward of different innovators and changemakers and disruptors and we feel it’s because we have this magnetism and they understood that Levi’s is, has been and always will be for progress.

Riley: And what we concluded was this was not a brand that needed to be reinvented. Everything it needed was right there. It was almost like we had to excavate the very best parts of it and what was so iconic about Levi’s was this embrace that it had had from so many originals throughout history.

For a fashion brand and a retail brand, it was about identifying the platform that would guide everything that we did and it was rooted in outfitting the originals and this notion of progress. And I think one of the important debates and discussions and agreements that we made was that progress could not always be activism and movements. Sure, sometimes it was that, but it was also a series of small everyday gestures and that relentless pursuit of moving things forward. Can you talk a little bit about the brand’s perspective on that and how that allows that platform to be really inclusive?

Sundberg: We don’t think that originality is a destination necessarily. It’s a way of moving through the world and progress is the partner of those originals that we often find ourselves celebrating. We did really very intentionally set the idea of progress as a range of things and it was from the very small to the very momentous. And importantly, too, it wasn’t always about the progress that you were making for the world, but also some of the things that you were doing for yourself and that made this idea something that was accessible to the everyday person.

Riley: One of the things that we were focused on together was the issue around women because the brand had long been seen as the No. 1 denim brand, but it was under-indexing with women and much of its storytelling through the years had felt a little bit more through the male lens. We were wrestling with that, and then the universe gave us a great gift, which was Beyoncé launching Cowboy Carter, where she was being as original as you can be, and she drops “ Levii’s Jeans” the song and you guys in a beat respond by changing the logo in your social handle and that really was the beginning of a partnership with her that became very, very deep and multidimensional. Can you take us to that time and what the brand was thinking when it was like, “Holy shit, I think we’re going to partner with Beyoncé.”

Sundberg: It was a gift from the universe. And knowing how intentional she is, putting our brand into this landmark album, it felt like it was a request for us to come forward and make something happen with her. And the Reiimagine campaign was incredible. It was so much more than just a partnership with a celebrity. But what stands out is she has this unique ability to find something very familiar and put it through a new context and with that bring a whole new meaning to the thing that she’s found herself involved in and look what happened with country music and that was an inspiration for us and how we could look at the things that were familiar to us, like the place that we were at with the men’s versus women’s business and see if there was something that we could do with that level of intention to make a difference. And a lot of our historic advertising did have a distinctly male perspective, but looking at it through a modern context, we thought, “Well, gosh, we could completely reframe and recontextualize those stories through her lens and today’s lens and give them entirely new meaning.” And that’s exactly what we did.

Riley: That was what excited us as well — the idea that we could reimagine these iconic Levi’s stories, first done beautifully by BBH, but through a female perspective, and as she came in and had this very disruptive cultural moment, it aligned perfectly with the narrative of the brand. And to be able to retell those stories through a Black female lens felt really important. Women did respond to it because it really felt like this reclamation, this declaration, and I think the brand did it so wholeheartedly.

There was product, there was tour integration, there was retail presence, there was obviously the storytelling. You needed to be able to rally quite a few partners around that idea and you had to be willing to cede a bit of control to her and her team. That’s something brands are really grappling with now. They’re excited about what partnerships and creators and influencers can bring to a brand story. Did you guys hesitate around that, or did you embrace it and all the things that would come with it?

Sundberg: We did spend a lot of time together with her as well as with all of the agency partners because it took quite a spread of folks to be able to pull off all that we did across the entire year that the campaign lived and there was a lot of intention setting at the front of that to make sure that we were really clear on what progress meant and it made partnership easier. It made collaboration easier. It made relinquishing a bit of control here and there a lot easier, too, because we were very confident that everyone was trying to achieve the same thing.

Riley: There are so many flash-in-the-pan moments for brands right now, which is not necessarily a bad thing that you grab the news cycle and I think there was a lot of intentionality around making sure that this was a fully complete thought from the brand. That there was a real strong Levi’s story at the heart of this and it felt very natural.

Right on its heels, we had an opportunity with the Super Bowl being hosted in San Francisco in Levi’s Stadium to bring Levi’s out of Super Bowl retirement after decades of being away and it was two simple insights that drove that campaign: One, the iconic pocket with the red label and that your ass looks pretty good in a pair of Levi’s. Saying, "Yeah, we are actually going to take 30 seconds of Super Bowl airtime and just show famous butts,” is a pretty bold move. What was the discussion behind that decision?

Sundberg: It wasn’t the first idea, right? But when that one came into existence, we knew in its simplicity, in its universality, in its intentionality, we have this bigger ambition to bring the brand and its point of view into the center of culture. But that said, this wasn’t a Super Bowl ad for us. This was the launch of our next global brand campaign, and we used that moment to really kick-start it and set into motion this narrative that we continued to draw on and expand across the year. We were setting a goalpost at the beginning and setting the one at the end of the campaign run.

Riley: I think from an agency perspective, knowing that Levi’s had a culture that respected a brand platform that wanted to do work that was culture-denting and business-driving and that we could go in and confidently sell to the business shaking butts and you would understand the power that could have for the brand and the business would be like, “Yep, that makes sense.” That is what we always look for and respected in our partnership.

I’m curious: What was the aspect of the dynamic for you guys that gave you the trust to say, “Let’s make some leaps together. We won’t always know where this goes, but we’ll journey together and take the right risks together”?

Sundberg: There was a lot of deep discussion, a lot of challenging each other, but in the best way possible. And we felt so solid on that foundation that it gave us confidence as we continued to build off of that into ideas that demonstrated that we were moving in the right direction.

Riley: We saw the business impact come with it, too, so it wasn’t just about these dynamic creative ideas nor the partnership, but it was impactful in the way that the business needed while bringing the brand into that conversation more often than it had been in in recent years. It wasn’t always roses. I think like any relationship, there were ups and downs. But I always get a sense from the people that work at Levi’s that it’s more than just a job and we feel that as your partner as well. It’s a brand that deserves a higher level of devotion and sometimes we may not always align on something or there’s friction in the process. But there were two things that always guided us. One was the privilege that we felt that we got to work on this brand and what that demanded and then a commitment to great ideas, and if we just kept that as the guide, we could navigate the daily friction and fray.

Sundberg: We knew where we were going and we were going there together.