Mike Rowe, star of the TV show "Dirty Jobs", has been hired to promote Lee Premium Select jeans in a new advertising campaign. The campaign aims to convince men that buying new clothes, even when the economy is weak, can help them attract positive attention without spending a lot of money. Rowe will appear in TV, print, and social media ads promoting the $42 jeans as a more affordable option than designer jeans. The campaign hopes to counter consumer skittishness by positioning the jeans as practical, everyday wear that makes the buyer feel confident at a reasonable price.

1. Advertising
A Regular-Guy Approach to Entice Men to
Shop for Jeans
By STUART ELLIOTT
Published: August 12, 2010
MIKE ROWE, the star of “Dirty Jobs” on the Discovery Channel, has tackled some arduous
tasks, among them shark repellent tester and septic tank cleaner. But now he confronts perhaps
the dirtiest job of all: persuading shoppers to buy a new product when the economy appears to be
weakening again.
Enlarge This Image
Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” is featured in a campaign for a new apparel line, Lee Premium Select
jeans. The idea is to tell men that they can attract positive attention without spending a lot.
Mr. Rowe has been signed to a multiyear contract to be the spokesman for Lee Premium Select,
a line of men’s denim being introduced by the Lee Jeans unit of the VF Corporation. The pants
will sell for about $42 a pair — more expensive than the basic jeans that compose the Wrangler
men’s line sold by VF, but less costly than men’s jeans bearing designer labels.
Mr. Rowe will appear in all aspects of the campaign, which is scheduled to begin on Monday.
There will be television commercials, print advertisements and efforts in social media like
Facebook and Twitter.

2. Mr. Rowe will also be featured on a microsite, or special Web site, devoted to humorous efforts
to make men feel better about buying clothes. The site, shopphobia.com, trades on traditional
beliefs that men, as a Web page declares, “prefer running from an angry bear to shopping a
storewide sale.”
Several agencies are handling the ads, in keeping with the trend for marketers to use multiple
resources for a single campaign. Among them are the New York office of Arnold Worldwide,
part of Havas, for the creative work; MEC, part of the GroupM unit of WPP, for media; and
Barkley in Kansas City, Mo., for the digital elements and public relations.
Lee plans to spend 30 percent more than it usually does on ads for men’s jeans to promote the
new line, said Liz Cahill, vice president for marketing at Lee Jeans in Merriam, Kan., and will
increase the budget for digital ads by 120 percent.
VF spent $7.8 million last year to advertise Lee Jeans for men in major media, according to the
Kantar Media unit of WPP, compared with $8.4 million in 2008.
VF is also making what Ms. Cahill described as a “sizable, significant” donation to the Mike
Rowe Works Foundation; she declined to be more specific. The foundation supports workers in
the skilled trades with efforts like education and career planning.
“I’m looking for partners who share the same world view about work,” Mr. Rowe said in a
phone interview, particularly in “reinvigorating the trades.”
“It’s something the country ought to be talking about,” he added. “We’ve got to fall back in love
with making things.” Lee Jeans joins a list of brands endorsed by Mr. Rowe that includes
Caterpillar, Ford Motor, W. W. Grainger and Motorola.
Mr. Rowe and Ms. Cahill said they have talked about collaborating on a line of work clothes that
would, ideally, be made in the United States.
Lee Jeans is among several apparel brands that are seeking to counter the skittishness among
shoppers, male and female, as economic data begin to suggest the recovery from the recession
may be sputtering. Others include the Dickies line of work wear, the 1969 jeans brand sold by
the Gap division of Gap Inc. and Levi’s jeans from Levi Strauss & Company.
“It is a little tough the past couple years,” said John Staffen, chief creative officer at the Arnold
New York office, citing not only economic conditions but also the competition in the jeans
category, “from $200 designer jeans all the way back to” lower-price products.
“We’ve been playing around with the idea of using someone like Mike Rowe to ground what Lee
stands for,” Mr. Staffen said, “not designer jeans, not cutting edge, a little more practical.”
“That straightforward honesty seems to sync up with the way people are spending money now,”
he added.

3. In one commercial, Mr. Rowe looks in a store window and says: “A hundred bucks for a pair of
jeans? Give me a break.”
Lee Premium Select, however, costs “less than 50 bucks,” he says, and makes “my butt look
good.”
In another commercial, Mr. Rowe, walking down a street, says: “You know what I like about my
Lee Premium Select jeans? Everything. They’re soft, they’re strong, they’ve got a great new fit
and my girlfriend says they make my butt look good.”
A young woman he passes chimes in, “Looking good, Mike.” As he walks on, he thanks her,
then confides sheepishly, “That’s not my girlfriend.”
The commercials end with an announcer declaring, “Getting comfortable never looked so good.”
That line also doubles as the headline in the print ads.
On shopphobia.com, Mr. Rowe will be lauded, tongue in cheek, as the “international shop
phobic recovery ambassador” who presents the new jeans as “the cure for a regular guy’s shop
phobia.”
Mr. Rowe has an “approachable persona,” said Mark Logan, vice president and managing
director for interactive at Barkley, enabling the campaign to avoid the clichés typically inherent
in ads that portray shopping as a fate for men worse than death or less than manly.
Lee Premium Select jeans will be sold at stores like Kohl’s, J. C. Penney and Sears and also on
lee.com. Underlining the challenge Lee Jeans faces, the Kohl’s Corporation said on Thursday
that it expected slower sales growth as the year continues. And Penney has been losing market
share to the Macy’s unit of Macy’s Inc.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 13, 2010, on page B3 of the New York edition.