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).

I've never really understood the car-as-status-symbol thing. As long as it gets you from A to B, carries everything you need and doesn't break down what else is there to care about. Advertising is just an investment designed to raise the profit margin - so the more the firm has spent on its 'brand' the more you are over-paying for the product. The only car ad I can remember is that one with the attractive French woman and her dad.

You do not have to understand it, still less like it, but you should acknowledge it. Cars do have brand value, as do watches and trainers. You might as well say you do not understand why people eat curry so hot it means they taste nothing else, sweat profusely and rush to the smallest room, when all they need is the basic food groups and some vitamins. (Ah, time for Deliveroo!)

This applies at the highest level with expensive cars but also with boring family saloons. Here is a 1990s documentary on fleet cars, with almost every driver mentioning how their company car reflects their status to colleagues, customers and competitors.

1994: SECRETS of the COMPANY CAR MEN | From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring | BBC Archive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh359S3Eg1U

This is just a sad reflection of how the advertising industry has warped people's minds until their own self-image is bound up in things they own instead of things that actually matter.

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.

It's nearly, but not quite there. They had this great idea but didn't know how to end it (I half expected to see the sheep in the back of the car but that would have been a different model).

I liked the ad, but they made that classic mistake of going all derivative and showing the actual car

I think most car adverts don't show an actual car either - it's all CGI.

The most misleading thing is the completely empty streets, devoid of pedestrians, cyclists, buses, thousands of other single-occupant cars. They try to sell freedom but the reality of driving for most people is sedentary frustration.

Actual representation of a car then

When (if!) self driving cars become a thing then I guess we will see some cars navigating shitty driving environments with the 'driver' relaxing in the back.

On John Prescott. First of the core New Labour figures the public will remember to head to the pearly gates. I guess he was a little older than the others.

Without looking them up, my vague memory is that all the New Labour types were about the same age so will be in their 70s now (and PB discussed this recently with the news that Harriet Harman was going to the Lords at the same time as an age limit will be applied, which again fits with her being in her 70s).

Margaret Beckett traced back to the Callaghan years and is 81. Of the big names, I don't recall any others as being from an earlier political generation than Blair and Brown. Maybe in fringe positions...

There were quite a few in early Blair Cabinets - Michael Meacher, Jack Cunningham, Harriet Harman, Jack Straw, David Blunkett.

Michael Meacher at least was at Parliamentary Under Secretary level from 1974-1979.

One question is whether you call them "New Labour".

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.

A serious vibration problem, by the look of it.

Cars are supposed to leave you stirred, not shaken?

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 makes very little sense for Putin to go nuclear at the moment (let’s leave aside the fact that Uncle Xi will tell him not to).

He is currently making progress on the battlefield and he’s weeks away from being opposite a US President who wants to give him an off ramp.

What purpose does a nuclear launch serve right now?

No. What suits Putin at the moment is to give the impression that he’s ramping up to a nuclear crisis, because he will think that strengthens his hand in negotiations with Trump (“look at what I can do. My nuclear doctrine is already being breached. My ICBMs are ready” etc etc).

That doesn’t preclude the fact that there is an uncomfortable chance we really could have a nuclear crisis in 2025, particularly if Trump plays hardball and Putin isn’t having any of it, but we’re not at that point yet.

but what if you are wrong - I am not a massive fan of playing a game where if my judgement is not right I and the rest of the UK get obliterated . We should not have allowed the use of storm missiles. Its kinda a big downside with little upside (its not going to turn the war just satisfy politicians looking tough and Biden getting one over Trump )

And what if you are wrong? What happens if Putin then uses the same threat on other matters, and we constantly cave in to his threats?

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're really m making me feel old!

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).

I've never really understood the car-as-status-symbol thing. As long as it gets you from A to B, carries everything you need and doesn't break down what else is there to care about. Advertising is just an investment designed to raise the profit margin - so the more the firm has spent on its 'brand' the more you are over-paying for the product. The only car ad I can remember is that one with the attractive French woman and her dad.

You do not have to understand it, still less like it, but you should acknowledge it. Cars do have brand value, as do watches and trainers. You might as well say you do not understand why people eat curry so hot it means they taste nothing else, sweat profusely and rush to the smallest room, when all they need is the basic food groups and some vitamins. (Ah, time for Deliveroo!)

This applies at the highest level with expensive cars but also with boring family saloons. Here is a 1990s documentary on fleet cars, with almost every driver mentioning how their company car reflects their status to colleagues, customers and competitors.

1994: SECRETS of the COMPANY CAR MEN | From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring | BBC Archive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh359S3Eg1U

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)

Ukrainian media are reporting it as an RS-26, which according to Wikipedia has a range of ~5,000km - just enough to be classed as an ICBM, albeit short of the distance from Western Russia to the Eastern US.

This is the claimed damage.
https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1859538071554818541

That doesn't look much like an ICBM which has a warhead capacity of at least 600kilos, travelling at hypersonic speed.
Unless they just put in some inert lumps of metal.

Some of the videos suggested multiple RVs - or that the missile disintegrated during reentry.

On John Prescott. First of the core New Labour figures the public will remember to head to the pearly gates. I guess he was a little older than the others.

I guess they aren't remembered so well now, simply because they died a long time ago, but Robin Cook and Donald Dewar? Blair's first Foreign Secretary and the first First Minister of Scotland were seriously big beasts at that time and hugely influential. Mo Mowlam was also a big part of the Northern Ireland process.

Mo Mowlam wasn’t very popular inside New Labour though, she was completely cast aside.

Was I alone in thinking Mo Mowlam was rubbish? Her strategy appeared to be to pander to the extremists on either side - she massively strengthened the hand of the more, er, muscular strands of loyalism and republicanism and sidelined the pragmatists.

Doubtful if you get the Good Friday over the line without getting the majority of the IRA and UVF onside.

No peace process is perfect but its mainly worked even in the face of Brexit.

In order to achieve peace, Mowlam had to persuade each side not to allow themselves to rise to provocations and outrages committed by the other side.

(Obviously, this has not been achieved in the Middle East, where the alternative strategy of complete military victory is being pursued. Even if this works, the Northern Ireland way would have been cheaper, more humane, and probably longer-lasting.)

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).

I've never really understood the car-as-status-symbol thing. As long as it gets you from A to B, carries everything you need and doesn't break down what else is there to care about. Advertising is just an investment designed to raise the profit margin - so the more the firm has spent on its 'brand' the more you are over-paying for the product. The only car ad I can remember is that one with the attractive French woman and her dad.