Best Of

Since Jags are still on topic, FPT:

The Jaguar ad will get people talking - in the same way as Bud Light did in US....

I hope that Jag are doing some resilience work around Mr Chump's impending tariffs. AFAICs unlike their competitors, they do not have factories in the USA. That's where about 25-30% of their sales go.

I wasn't very kind about the ad - on aesthetic / style it feels to be following "United Colours of Benetton" or "FCUK" 2-3 decades later, and so is quite derivative. I may have missed something.

But for me the idea that a Jaguar is aspirational and worth investing emotion in is ridiculous on its face. A car is at root a transport appliance, nothing more. It needs to be safe, and comfortable, and may be nice to drive - none of that is worth obsessing about or wasting time for the expression of pride. I'm more emotional about my fridge.

Jaguar as a brand does command some loyalty and emotion. But it is nostalgia rather for anything they have done in the last 30 years.

Jaguar is a brand that trades on its name and it’s heritage, E-Type for example, but has made largely bland, generic, cars for many years. I worked on X100, X202, X350, X760 and X761 and the driving force behind all of them was not style or innovation, unlike some of the Range Rover range, but cost. Everything as cheap as possible. They were effectively rebadged Fords for a while too.

It is a shame Dura Ace no longer seems to hang out. I am sure he would have a lot. Ore to say on their cars.

Well, not really. I bought an XE in 2017 and absolutely loved it.

Jag did really well with their 2013-2019 marques.

The solution is to not get a Jag next time. Vote with your wallet and don't support companies that clearly hate you anyway.

I won't. I'll be emailing my dealership to tell them that this morning.

"Jag" seem to thing they'll be opening up a whole new market here, and so pissing off their existing base doesn't matter.

Chortle. They are so so wrong.

Out of interest, if the new Jag turns out to be the best car since the E type when they unveil it, a powerhouse, a work of art, a car that says *I have arrived* would you still refuse to buy it?

I've always felt that what you say in your marketing doesn't actually matter that much. The product does the talking. All marketing does is make people aware of the product.

And on that criterion the Jaguar ad has been a stonking success.

I'm sure Bud Lite marketing execs had the same sentiment early on during their controversy.

Bud lite is also carbonated piss.

If the new Jag turns out to be a lean, mean, driving machine, will all be forgiven?

I personally don't care about whether the ad is 'woke' or not, it just seems stale and cliched. But sometimes you get bad ads for good products.

If I may be so bold, I'm guessing that you are in the 0.001% of early adopters and open to, and au fait with new trends and whatnot.

To say an ad like that, featuring what appears to be a range of genders in striking tones, doing weird-ass things, and which is visually sumptuous and nothing particularly to do with the thing it is supposed to be advertising, is "stale and cliched" I think is pushing it a bit. It is, as we have seen by the reaction to it on PB this morning, a complete mind f**k to 83.5% of the population.

Perfume ads have been doing it for years. Decades in fact. The whole "copy nothing" "break molds" spiel is so cliched as to be meaningless.

Granted it's quite novel for a car company to market itself in this way, but think about ads that have broken moulds and been genuine WTF moments. The Sony Bravia exploding paint ads (pretty heady stuff for 2006) or the Cadbury's Gorilla (2007) were genuinely standout.

What about this ad stands out? It's a bunch of people dressed like extras from Zoolander faffing about on screen while cliched phrases appear in text. Nothing about it feels new, and everything about it feels like a paint by numbers ad following a brand strategy that says 'our old customers are dying off, we need to create something that appeals to a different audience, what about the type of people who buy expensive handbags and designer clobber like that? maybe we can be the brand for them'.

It's an ad that borrows every imaginable high fashion cliche possible while saying absolutely nothing. But it is certainly not envelope pushing.

And yet....and yet....we have been talking about nothing else (imminent nuclear Armageddon notwithstanding) on PB, of all places. It is the talk of Twitter. Everyone is talking about Jaguar. More fool you (and @Leon) if you are not meta enough to understand (surely you are) that it might be referencing those "cliches" you just listed in order to create a post-modern "what would you do to create a new ad" ad.

Do you work for the agency that lost out to these guys? Seems you have far stronger thoughts on it than others, even Casino, and he is as we speak dusting down his sheepskin coat.

I used to work in the marketing department at a global evil megacorp, so my interest is professional, even though I left the industry several years ago. I work as a consultant for startups now. And as I said before, JLR's ads are made in house, by their own marketing team. So impossible to 'lose out' to them... (and the lack of competitive process may be why the ad is crap, the Pepsi Kendall Jenner debacle was also made in-house).

I'm just fascinated by the strategy and execution of the campaign, as well as its provenance.

Accenture are of course most famous for just bouncing a QR code on screen for 30 seconds and nothing else during the superbowl (while everyone else was spending millions on high budget films).

That ad won the grand prix at Cannes - https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/accenture-song-coinbase-win-direct-grand-prix-less-talk-bitcoin/1790984 - which is a pretty prestigious award. It's also the only ad from that year's superbowl I can remember. It was utterly slated at the time.

So what I'm saying is that it is possible that they know what they're doing, and all of this is designed to deliberately stir up controversy.

Whether that strategy will work or not I don't know. It looks a lot more like shitting on a hundred years of brand history and the current customer base to me. But if the car turns out to be a brilliant must have, they will have played a blinder, if even someone like Casino can't say for sure they wouldn't buy the car if it turned out to be incredible.

Far more fun than talking about impending nuclear death and destruction. We've had too many THREADS on that already (chortle).

Since Jags are still on topic, FPT:

The Jaguar ad will get people talking - in the same way as Bud Light did in US....

I hope that Jag are doing some resilience work around Mr Chump's impending tariffs. AFAICs unlike their competitors, they do not have factories in the USA. That's where about 25-30% of their sales go.

I wasn't very kind about the ad - on aesthetic / style it feels to be following "United Colours of Benetton" or "FCUK" 2-3 decades later, and so is quite derivative. I may have missed something.

But for me the idea that a Jaguar is aspirational and worth investing emotion in is ridiculous on its face. A car is at root a transport appliance, nothing more. It needs to be safe, and comfortable, and may be nice to drive - none of that is worth obsessing about or wasting time for the expression of pride. I'm more emotional about my fridge.

Jaguar as a brand does command some loyalty and emotion. But it is nostalgia rather for anything they have done in the last 30 years.

Jaguar is a brand that trades on its name and it’s heritage, E-Type for example, but has made largely bland, generic, cars for many years. I worked on X100, X202, X350, X760 and X761 and the driving force behind all of them was not style or innovation, unlike some of the Range Rover range, but cost. Everything as cheap as possible. They were effectively rebadged Fords for a while too.

It is a shame Dura Ace no longer seems to hang out. I am sure he would have a lot. Ore to say on their cars.

Well, not really. I bought an XE in 2017 and absolutely loved it.

Jag did really well with their 2013-2019 marques.

The solution is to not get a Jag next time. Vote with your wallet and don't support companies that clearly hate you anyway.

I won't. I'll be emailing my dealership to tell them that this morning.

"Jag" seem to thing they'll be opening up a whole new market here, and so pissing off their existing base doesn't matter.

Chortle. They are so so wrong.

Out of interest, if the new Jag turns out to be the best car since the E type when they unveil it, a powerhouse, a work of art, a car that says *I have arrived* would you still refuse to buy it?

I've always felt that what you say in your marketing doesn't actually matter that much. The product does the talking. All marketing does is make people aware of the product.

And on that criterion the Jaguar ad has been a stonking success.

I'm sure Bud Lite marketing execs had the same sentiment early on during their controversy.

Bud lite is also carbonated piss.

If the new Jag turns out to be a lean, mean, driving machine, will all be forgiven?

I personally don't care about whether the ad is 'woke' or not, it just seems stale and cliched. But sometimes you get bad ads for good products.

If I may be so bold, I'm guessing that you are in the 0.001% of early adopters and open to, and au fait with new trends and whatnot.

To say an ad like that, featuring what appears to be a range of genders in striking tones, doing weird-ass things, and which is visually sumptuous and nothing particularly to do with the thing it is supposed to be advertising, is "stale and cliched" I think is pushing it a bit. It is, as we have seen by the reaction to it on PB this morning, a complete mind f**k to 83.5% of the population.

Perfume ads have been doing it for years. Decades in fact. The whole "copy nothing" "break molds" spiel is so cliched as to be meaningless.

Granted it's quite novel for a car company to market itself in this way, but think about ads that have broken moulds and been genuine WTF moments. The Sony Bravia exploding paint ads (pretty heady stuff for 2006) or the Cadbury's Gorilla (2007) were genuinely standout.

What about this ad stands out? It's a bunch of people dressed like extras from Zoolander faffing about on screen while cliched phrases appear in text. Nothing about it feels new, and everything about it feels like a paint by numbers ad following a brand strategy that says 'our old customers are dying off, we need to create something that appeals to a different audience, what about the type of people who buy expensive handbags and designer clobber like that? maybe we can be the brand for them'.

It's an ad that borrows every imaginable high fashion cliche possible while saying absolutely nothing. But it is certainly not envelope pushing.

It's an advert that would have been edgy in 2004 not in 2014 and definitely not in 2024. It's in fact so mundanely DEI that it barely registers except in the sense that one feels as thought the consultancy firm JLR hired is full of *****.

Porsche are also doing their bit for DEI:

https://x.com/porsche/status/1859293440422363642

That's a good advert, not sure what the issue with it is.

Government borrowing up to £17.4bn last month: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gx70djyg7o

It was driven higher by public pay settlements. These are truly terrifying figures. They would be bad in a deep recession but they are being incurred when the economy grew faster than expected in the first half of the year and was flat for Q3. We are in what passes for normal times and yet we are borrowing like we were funding a major war. The decisions by Reeves and Starmer to increase public spending yet further in the budget are increasingly looking dangerous rather than merely stupid.

What's most terrifying is that we borrowed more this October than in 2021 during COVI, second highest on record after October 2020.

£150bn in extra borrowing and lower growth. Labour are going to bankrupt the nation, I don't think my prediction of requiring an IMF bailout is far off the mark.

Could we have dollar parity by the time Starmer and Trump are done ?

We almost had dollar parity in 1985. Bloody Labour.

‘Almost’ so we didn’t have dollar parity

1.054 in 1985 was the closest we've come to dollar parity, ever, despite being slap bang in the middle of the Thatcher government with North Sea Oil pouring out of, erm, the North Sea, and Rachel Reeves blamelessly revising for her O-levels.

Fake news.

Rachel Reeves would have been revising for her O-levels in 1995 not 1985.

You sure she didn’t get that wrong on her CV, too?

https://x.com/osinttechnical/status/1859519312924471448

The Ukrainian Air Force confirmed that Russia struck the Ukrainian city of Dnipro with a conventionally armed ICBM this morning, marking the first combat use of an ICBM in history.

Why isn't Leon all over this? The only explanation that makes sense to me is that this is a demonstration by Russia to show that their ICBMs work.

Russia's deterrence credibility is in tatters. It has repeatedly promised massive retribution and repeatedly failed to deliver said retribution when it's rhetorical red lines have been crossed. Ukraine has occupied sovereign Russian territory for months, which still strikes me as unthinkable that a non-nuclear power should occupy part of the territory of a nuclear power.

Russia has chosen this moment to show that its ICBMs work. This is crunch time now.

It wasn't an ICBM

An ICBM launch, for a start, would have had the US President on Airforce One in a scramble takeoff.

The DSPS satellites can detect such launches instantly - that's what they are for.

The energy signature of an ICBM is much, much higher than an IRBM (Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile) or MRBM (Medium Range Ballistic Missile)

"An ICBM launch, for a start, would have had the US President on Airforce One in a scramble takeoff."

Tests of ICBMs / IRBMs are preannounced precisely to stop this. "We are test firing a missile from this location; expect your satellite sensors to see a thermal bloom" style of thing.

My *guess* is that Russia told the US that they were going to 'test' a missile (whether ICBM or IRMB), and that led to the US's warning yesterday.

Fantastic new jaguar ad. Outraged old white blokes who use string-backed driving gloves is exactly the reaction they wanted I'm guessing.

They are trying to reinvent the brand (think Orange, which everyone laughed at until they didn't) and are using up to the moment images and memes.

What the cars are going to be like goodness only knows.

If the cars are amazing, then it might work.
A high risk punt by them.

When did JLR last make a jag that was amazing ? The eighties.

The one that Morse used to drive.

The old jaguar was also the go,to car for the villains in the sweeney. Always getting smashed up after a car chase after a blagging with Regan shouting ‘shut it you slags’

During the 1960s, programmes often used stock footage of a Jaguar going over a cliff. It is jarring once you notice, so you're probably better off not reading this.

The Sweeney generally shot all their footage. Some die hard do tours of the locations. Very few sadly exist. Although the pub in Night Out is still there.

The blown up helicopter from a Bond movie made a fair few appearance even in the timeless classic Dr Who story the Daemons.

There is a YouTube channel showing Sweeney locations, then & now.
https://www.youtube.com/@Sweenealogy

This one of the titles being filmed across the road from the studio came across my Youtube this week. Colet Gardens in Hammersmith.

(2 minutes):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPlCpbLVg0o

reading comment blogs other than PB, are we now getting a sense more and more people on the right are going over to Farage and Reform position, that NATO and EU expansion caused the unnecessary bloodshed and horror in Ukraine, and Labour are making yet another crisis escalating and prolonging it?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14106589/Im-terrified-brink-nuclear-war-hopeless-Government-provoking-Putin-pushing-button-STEPHEN-GLOVER.html

Are there any shifts in the backing government on Ukraine polling?

If there are, the Conservative Front Bench, which has got off to a strong start under Kemi in how they are positioning themselves on the side of every disillusioned voter, follows the voter shift to keep the clear blue water with Labour and not with Reform, Starmer won’t have the country’s backing for what he is doing - that would be a very dangerous place for government.

Looking ahead, surely we can only see Musk and Trump soon piling in behind Farage and Reform and lambasting Starmer on this? That could shift views, and put Labour in difficult place with its own people and the media,

According to Ipsos in the last 15 months support for the Government's position on Ukraine has dropped 4 points to 54% and opposition to it has risen 3 points to 17%. That really isn't much movement.

Support is down a fair but from the peak of support in February 2023 when it was at 68% with opposition at 11%. But still overall opposition to British support for Ukraine is still only at aroun 1 in 6 people.

Conservatives are still most supportive at 81% so not much chance of them forming a new policy on this.

Government borrowing up to £17.4bn last month: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gx70djyg7o

It was driven higher by public pay settlements. These are truly terrifying figures. They would be bad in a deep recession but they are being incurred when the economy grew faster than expected in the first half of the year and was flat for Q3. We are in what passes for normal times and yet we are borrowing like we were funding a major war. The decisions by Reeves and Starmer to increase public spending yet further in the budget are increasingly looking dangerous rather than merely stupid.

What's most terrifying is that we borrowed more this October than in 2021 during COVI, second highest on record after October 2020.

£150bn in extra borrowing and lower growth. Labour are going to bankrupt the nation, I don't think my prediction of requiring an IMF bailout is far off the mark.

Could we have dollar parity by the time Starmer and Trump are done ?

We almost had dollar parity in 1985. Bloody Labour.

‘Almost’ so we didn’t have dollar parity

1.054 in 1985 was the closest we've come to dollar parity, ever, despite being slap bang in the middle of the Thatcher government with North Sea Oil pouring out of, erm, the North Sea, and Rachel Reeves blamelessly revising for her O-levels.

Fake news.

Rachel Reeves would have been revising for her O-levels in 1995 not 1985.

Fake news.

O-levels stopped in 1987. Rachel did GCSEs.

That's what's wrong with politicians nowadays, they all did namby-pamby GCSEs rather than proper O-Levels like what we* did!

*full disclosure: I did GCSEs

Bloody whipper-snappers invading PB !