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 *****.
Hope Valley, Derbyshire, and around Mam Tor, apparently.
I know that road well (actually, those roads - Winnatts pass and the Barber Booth road.) No objection to the advert, though I don't get the bagpipes and don't really understand the narrative. But it's less punchable than most car adverts, not least because it's recognisably British.
They are pretending it's Scotland.
See the Highland Cattle.
Out of control anti-social Scottish Cows have history in the area. Several years ago they went for a dog near Baslow - 4-legged reevers. They have never forgotten being chased out of Derby in 1745.
A herd of cattle has been forced from a Peak District beauty spot it had grazed on for 40 years after a complaint.
The 30-strong highland herd had roamed Baslow Edge for decades alongside a popular footpath.
Last year the cows, which had young calves, confronted a dog. When the owner complained, farmer Alex Birch was told by authorities to move his herd.
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 *****.
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?
The ride quality looks worse than the old MkII Jag.
The best for rough roads was the old Allegro with hydragas
(Really, in fact - we had an Allegro estate when I was growing up and the switch to the next car with standard suspension was very noticeable, particularly on an old pot-holed gravel track we used to traverse quite often. Pile of shit in many ways, but the suspension was impressive.)
If memory serves, it has the same suspension principle as the Challenger 2 tank. Yes, really.
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.
The novelty is it's an ad for a product when there is no product - and won't be for ages.
The success is in reminding everyone Jaguar still exists, even though it has no product.
Not sure though they've quite caught the notion of "It'll be worth the wait, honest...."
AFAICS things have been going downhill since the XK150 DHC (in Old English White, obvs). Okay and the E-Type.
Recent models have been trading on that magnificent legacy without coming close to the sheer style and elegance, and performance.
Now, everyone is waiting to see what they do next.
Surely that is success in anyone's books.
I was at Brands Hatch when the Good Lady Wife was filming a documentary about Ferrari in the 50's.
For no real reason, as well as the two Ferraris used for filming, they also brought along Mike Hawthorn's D-Type.
Which was rather wonderful to see. Lord knows how much it must be worth.
I mean this is the same calculus as if China invaded Taiwan (leave aside how successful it might be). Would the US really go to war over Taiwan. Would the US really go to (nuclear) war over Ukraine.
So far the answer to the latter has been a resounding no. What would change that. A tactical nuke in Ukraine? Perhaps. Not sure why it would, that said.
What would we do if they nuked a Ukrainian town... or Sheffield ?
If its Slough we'd thank them?
My guess would be if they nuked a Ukrainian town, NATO would aircraft would rapidly degrade Russian fighting capability in Ukraine.
If they nuked Sheffield, then our government would order a strike against an equivalent target in Russia.
Surely if they nuke any UK target our response would have to be overwhelming, not merely tit for tat. That's the whole point of Trident and the nuclear deterrent.
The response has to be catastrophic enough to make taking the first step unthinkable.
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 *****.
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 *****.
Hope Valley, Derbyshire, and around Mam Tor, apparently.
I know that road well (actually, those roads - Winnatts pass and the Barber Booth road.) No objection to the advert, though I don't get the bagpipes and don't really understand the narrative. But it's less punchable than most car adverts, not least because it's recognisably British.
They are pretending it's Scotland.
See the Highland Cattle.
Out of control anti-social Scottish Cows have history in the area. Several years ago they went for a dog near Baslow - 4-legged reevers. They have never forgotten being chased out of Derby in 1745.
A herd of cattle has been forced from a Peak District beauty spot it had grazed on for 40 years after a complaint.
The 30-strong highland herd had roamed Baslow Edge for decades alongside a popular footpath.
Last year the cows, which had young calves, confronted a dog. When the owner complained, farmer Alex Birch was told by authorities to move his herd.
They're like arseholes who buy flats above pubs and have them closed down with noise complaints.
Yes, in my experience highland cows, despite appearances, are timid beasts.
It's not that. Cows with calves can be seriously dangerous (and kill more people than cyclists...), particularly when you have a dog.
It's the sense of entitlement. I'm as strong a right-to-roam advocate you'll find, but I get extremely pissed off with people who disturb livestock, light fires, paint rocks on top of Munros, trash crops, fly drones and so on.
Engage your brain - you're sharing the space with others, some of whom depend on the land for their livelihoods, and therefore also share the responsibility for conserving the wildlife, safeguarding livestock and keeping the place looking beautiful.
You're also responsible for your own safety - don't put your dog among cows, carry a bivvy bag, tell someone where you are going, have clothing ready for a 6 hour wait for mountain rescue.
Suspect we are witnessing the end of that particular section of international law.
Honest question, has the ICC issued arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas and those funding them?
The international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the county’s former defence minister Yoav Gallant and the Hamas leader Mohammed Deif for alleged war crimes relating to the Gaza war.
Wow! Badenoch is really socking Starmer in the Commons, in such a change to Sunak’s approach and capabilities.
“The prime minister’s foreign policy is a pick and mix of empty platitudes, unilateral commitments that he could have announced at home, and dangerous precedents – rushing to give away the Chagos islands and paying for the privilege, an ill-judged suspension of export licences to Israel, damaging our defence and security industry and failing to set out a roadmap for spending 2.5% GDP on defence in a world that is becoming yet more dangerous. Cop has not yet concluded, so we do not know what the final impact on the UK will be. But we do know the prime minister’s rush to a further cut in our emissions is yet another example of politicians putting short term publicity above long term planning. When will he publish the plans to achieve this new target? It is time for politicians to tell the truth, and it is time the prime minister provided some substance to back this costly rhetoric.”
For the leader of a party that ran the country to hell in a handcart, and burnt down even most of their own achievements to try and save their own backsides, she's got a more than proportionate helping of chutzpah.
Whether it is effective, or she is sawing off the branch she is sitting on, is something that we will find out with time.
Wow! Badenoch is really socking Starmer in the Commons, in such a change to Sunak’s approach and capabilities.
“The prime minister’s foreign policy is a pick and mix of empty platitudes, unilateral commitments that he could have announced at home, and dangerous precedents – rushing to give away the Chagos islands and paying for the privilege, an ill-judged suspension of export licences to Israel, damaging our defence and security industry and failing to set out a roadmap for spending 2.5% GDP on defence in a world that is becoming yet more dangerous. Cop has not yet concluded, so we do not know what the final impact on the UK will be. But we do know the prime minister’s rush to a further cut in our emissions is yet another example of politicians putting short term publicity above long term planning. When will he publish the plans to achieve this new target? It is time for politicians to tell the truth, and it is time the prime minister provided some substance to back this costly rhetoric.”
What’s becoming clearer, the reasons Starmer’s ratings are tanking is because the voters voted for change this year, and didn’t get change - the change from Sunak to Starmer is no change at all. Voters can’t feel change in the economy, the cost of things, or see change from policy to policy. The voters can see from how Badenoch is tearing shreds off Starmer in the Commons today, that change from Starmer to Badenoch is the real change they were after. It’s making the current government a bit of a lame duck just four months in!
Wow! Badenoch is really socking Starmer in the Commons, in such a change to Sunak’s approach and capabilities.
“The prime minister’s foreign policy is a pick and mix of empty platitudes, unilateral commitments that he could have announced at home, and dangerous precedents – rushing to give away the Chagos islands and paying for the privilege, an ill-judged suspension of export licences to Israel, damaging our defence and security industry and failing to set out a roadmap for spending 2.5% GDP on defence in a world that is becoming yet more dangerous. Cop has not yet concluded, so we do not know what the final impact on the UK will be. But we do know the prime minister’s rush to a further cut in our emissions is yet another example of politicians putting short term publicity above long term planning. When will he publish the plans to achieve this new target? It is time for politicians to tell the truth, and it is time the prime minister provided some substance to back this costly rhetoric.”
What’s becoming clearer, the reasons Starmer’s ratings are tanking is because the voters voted for change this year, and didn’t get change - the change from Sunak to Starmer is no change at all. The voters can see from how Badenoch is tearing shreds off Starmer in the Commons today, that change from Starmer to Badenoch is the real change they were after. It’s making the current government a bit of a lame duck just four months in!
When was this exchange with Banenoch? I've only seen two and in the first she was pitiful and in the second even worse. I'm sure she'll get better but it's not been apparent yet
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 *****.
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.
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 *****.
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?
The ride quality looks worse than the old MkII Jag.
The best for rough roads was the old Allegro with hydragas
(Really, in fact - we had an Allegro estate when I was growing up and the switch to the next car with standard suspension was very noticeable, particularly on an old pot-holed gravel track we used to traverse quite often. Pile of shit in many ways, but the suspension was impressive.)
If memory serves, it has the same suspension principle as the Challenger 2 tank. Yes, really.
Or vice versa.
Semi active suspension is perhaps preferable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2_Black_Panther ..The Black Panther fields an advanced semi-active suspension system, called the in-arm suspension unit (ISU), which allows for individual control of every bogie on the tracks. This posture control function can tilt the chassis or lower the overall height by 40 centimeters (16 in). This allows the K2 to "sit", "stand" and "kneel", as well as "lean" towards one side or a corner. "Sitting" gives the tank a lower profile and offers superior handling over roads. "Standing" gives the vehicle higher ground clearance for maneuverability over rough terrain. "Kneeling" augments the angular range in which the tank's gun barrel can elevate and depress, allowing the vehicle to fire its main gun downhill as well as engage low-flying aircraft more effectively. The height adjustable suspension system detects rough road surface conditions in real time through the movement of the first road wheel in front and collects data, and the five road wheels in the rear automatically control the hydraulic pressure of the in-arm suspension unit and variable damper based on this terrain data to maintain optimal driving performance...
I don't want to overstate things but this via Musk and Ramaswamy suggest a serious intent to go through with major cuts to the federal workforce, via their new oped
I don't want to overstate things but this via Musk and Ramaswamy suggest a serious intent to go through with major cuts to the federal workforce, via their new oped
This looks headed to the Supreme Court, as I doubt Congresspeople - Republicans included - will want some of these cuts on their slate when they face re-election in the midterms.
https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5000307-trump-appoints-doge-efficiency/ ...So how does this dynamic duo of non-official efficiency engineers propose to pull off their grand plans? Ramaswamy has mentioned a two-prong approach. First, defund all the government programs and entities that are operating without an authorization from Congress. As the Washington Post pointed out earlier this week, these range from veterans’ health care, drug development and opioid addiction treatment, the State Department and housing assistance, to the Justice Department, education spending, NASA, health care and student loans, international development and security assistance, and Head Start. As congressional experts point out, the lack of a formal statutory authorization does not leave these entities naked; the appropriations bills that fund them have the dual purpose of also automatically continuing their statutory authority. Ramaswamy asserts that the president could achieve most of the goals unilaterally, ignoring the strictures of the Impoundment Control Act which gives Congress a veto over any spending cuts. Trump may attempt to repeal that act, but Ramaswamy argues that is unnecessary because it is already unconstitutional. The Impoundment Control Act was enacted in 1974 as part of the Congressional Budget Act in response to President Richard M. Nixon’s practice of refusing to release funds for programs he opposed. The Impoundment Act requires Congress to approve presidential impoundments of funds in order for them to be rescinded (canceled). Because the Comptroller General, who is a creature of Congress, exercises certain executive authorities in administering the act, some say that renders the law unconstitutional...
Wow! Badenoch is really socking Starmer in the Commons, in such a change to Sunak’s approach and capabilities.
“The prime minister’s foreign policy is a pick and mix of empty platitudes, unilateral commitments that he could have announced at home, and dangerous precedents – rushing to give away the Chagos islands and paying for the privilege, an ill-judged suspension of export licences to Israel, damaging our defence and security industry and failing to set out a roadmap for spending 2.5% GDP on defence in a world that is becoming yet more dangerous. Cop has not yet concluded, so we do not know what the final impact on the UK will be. But we do know the prime minister’s rush to a further cut in our emissions is yet another example of politicians putting short term publicity above long term planning. When will he publish the plans to achieve this new target? It is time for politicians to tell the truth, and it is time the prime minister provided some substance to back this costly rhetoric.”
What’s becoming clearer, the reasons Starmer’s ratings are tanking is because the voters voted for change this year, and didn’t get change - the change from Sunak to Starmer is no change at all. The voters can see from how Badenoch is tearing shreds off Starmer in the Commons today, that change from Starmer to Badenoch is the real change they were after. It’s making the current government a bit of a lame duck just four months in!
When was this exchange with Banenoch? I've only seen two and in the first she was pitiful and in the second even worse. I'm sure she'll get better but it's not been apparent yet
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.
Re your last paragraph, if a car isn’t aspirational and is at root a transformation device then you just buy a BYD electric vehicle - why spend another potential £70k on a jag which might be no better? The answer is the badge, the history and the emotions.
It’s the same for all the old marques - people buying Electric Mercedes, BMW and Audi intent necessarily buying a better car than Tesla - they are buying a brand and image. Jaguar has run away screaming from what made people buy them and are now going to have to make some seriously amazing cars to attract those who would pay less for a Chinese EV or who would otherwise buy German.
The ad is catastrophic. Awkward, strange, inane, cringe
It’s not even interestingly NEW and DARING. It’s like they asked GPT3.5/Sora to “make an absurdly Woke ad for a car like it’s still 2019”
The ad is instantly dated. Calamitous
Could be all a publicity campaign, aimed at reminding people of what they liked about Jaguar, a bit like when they threaten to discontinue salad cream, or change the name of Pizza Hut to Pasta Hut.
If it's RS-26, its an IRBM made by removing a stage from an ICBM (RS-24)
As you called almost immediately.
Move aside Dura there's a new (spoddy, military equipment geeky) king in town.
I said it wasn't an ICBM - launch one of those, and the whole of Washington DC would get to see Airforce One perform an emergency power takeoff, followed by a max rate climb to altitude. Which would have woken up the whole town.
Also every American base with nuclear stuff, world wide, would have done various things.
I don't want to overstate things but this via Musk and Ramaswamy suggest a serious intent to go through with major cuts to the federal workforce, via their new oped
“Hey Jaguar, I fixed your awful ad. It took two minutes”. (Image of performance version of Jag saloon car, with attractive young lady in nightclub attire standing next to it).
Suspect we are witnessing the end of that particular section of international law.
Honest question, has the ICC issued arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas and those funding them?
Yes there were a whole set of Hamas officials who were included in the Chief Prosecutors original requests for indictments but since Israel has killed most of them they have dropped those they know to be dead.
Short debate on SLAPP lawsuits in the Commons, of which the UK is alleged to be a hub. It's like it was 2007.
A very interesting opening speech.
Describes a number of specific cases, some very large, where legal threats in the UK were used to attempt to impose silence.
One of which is mention of legal letters sent to Dan Neidle by one Nadhim Zahawi to stop him writing about several million £££ of taxes. (Mentioned in the Commons, so I can repeat here with no implications, I think)
It's already the most-used railway in the UK, with 220 million passenger journeys in 2023-24 - compared with the projected figure of just 200 million in 2030 that was used for the business case. Ten additional train sets have had to be ordered, as the current fleet of seventy are unlikely to be able to cope with the actual demand.
We seem to routinely under-estimate the value of new infrastructure, which must surely be part of the reason why we're so bad at actually building stuff. How do we fix this?
I don't want to overstate things but this via Musk and Ramaswamy suggest a serious intent to go through with major cuts to the federal workforce, via their new oped
Journalist is surprised that Trump and his acolytes will do what they said in public and online they were going to do.
I don't want to overstate things but this via Musk and Ramaswamy suggest a serious intent to go through with major cuts to the federal workforce, via their new oped
Journalist is surprised that Trump and his acolytes will do what they said in public and online they were going to do.
I suspect quite a lot of the folk who voted for it are going to be surprised, too.
The ethics report used a scanning electron microscope and X-Ray crystallography to find.... no ethics.
Speaking of ethics, watching Sunny Hostin from The View get told to immediately read out a ‘legal note’ by her own producers, having told her audience about the Gaetz allegations without mentioning that the Biden DOJ had spent two years investigating and declined to bring charges, was very funny.
I don't want to overstate things but this via Musk and Ramaswamy suggest a serious intent to go through with major cuts to the federal workforce, via their new oped
Journalist is surprised that Trump and his acolytes will do what they said in public and online they were going to do.
I suspect quite a lot of the folk who voted for it are going to be surprised, too.
I don't want to overstate things but this via Musk and Ramaswamy suggest a serious intent to go through with major cuts to the federal workforce, via their new oped
Journalist is surprised that Trump and his acolytes will do what they said in public and online they were going to do.
I suspect quite a lot of the folk who voted for it are going to be surprised, too.
The sad thing is that regulatory reform needs to be done. The cult of vast piles of documents and no enforcement has produced disaster after disaster. Public project inflation is rampant.
I suspect the main result of this will be making any attempt at real reform toxic for a generation.
The ethics report used a scanning electron microscope and X-Ray crystallography to find.... no ethics.
The Republicans in Congress trying to bury the report are basically arguing that the ethical criteria for hiring an Attorney General should be lower than those for a high school teacher.
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).
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.
After a horse house a car will be the most expensive purchase that most people make. Of course it's a status symbol. Your very disdain for its status as a status symbol communicates that you are above superficial displays of status.
You're still peacocking, just in a different way.
Yes, I am above superficial displays of status. Is that supposed to be a bad thing now?
I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm just saying you're displaying what you judge as virtues and status to others in the same way. Just different virtues and status.
How else would like-minded people find each other?
Some people pretend to a superior morality by denigrating status symbols.
I'm not pretending to be superior. It's just that if you haven't figured out that the purpose of brand advertising is to make you overpay for stuff then you are going to get ripped off and have less money to spend on things that are genuinely useful to you. Is mine a virtuous position? Not really. I'd say it's just well-informed.
I know. But I'm still more likely to buy Warhammer models than Wargames Atlantic or Northstar. Sometimes the value for the consumer isn't in the physical object.
But isn't much of that because GW have made it impossible to use other companies figures in their games? I mean GW stuff is nice enough but it is really not better sculpted or produced than North Star, Foundry or Warlord Games. Which isn't that surprising given a lot of the same people sculpt the ranges.
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).
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.
After a horse house a car will be the most expensive purchase that most people make. Of course it's a status symbol. Your very disdain for its status as a status symbol communicates that you are above superficial displays of status.
You're still peacocking, just in a different way.
Yes, I am above superficial displays of status. Is that supposed to be a bad thing now?
I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm just saying you're displaying what you judge as virtues and status to others in the same way. Just different virtues and status.
How else would like-minded people find each other?
Some people pretend to a superior morality by denigrating status symbols.
I'm not pretending to be superior. It's just that if you haven't figured out that the purpose of brand advertising is to make you overpay for stuff then you are going to get ripped off and have less money to spend on things that are genuinely useful to you. Is mine a virtuous position? Not really. I'd say it's just well-informed.
I know. But I'm still more likely to buy Warhammer models than Wargames Atlantic or Northstar. Sometimes the value for the consumer isn't in the physical object.
But isn't much of that because GW have made it impossible to use other companies figures in their games? I mean GW stuff is nice enough but it is really not better sculpted or produced than North Star, Foundry or Warlord Games. Which isn't that surprising given a lot of the same people sculpt the ranges.
It's already the most-used railway in the UK, with 220 million passenger journeys in 2023-24 - compared with the projected figure of just 200 million in 2030 that was used for the business case. Ten additional train sets have had to be ordered, as the current fleet of seventy are unlikely to be able to cope with the actual demand.
We seem to routinely under-estimate the value of new infrastructure, which must surely be part of the reason why we're so bad at actually building stuff. How do we fix this?
Head of Russian Central Bank reported to their parliament today. She’s not too happy.
https://x.com/mylovanov/status/1859351261692428680 TL:DR, there’s record low unemployment and record high job vacancies, record high factory capacity utilisation. GDP growth slowed to 3.1% in Q3, down from 4.1% in Q2 and 5.4% in Q1, stagflation is coming on steroids, with no growth predicted next year. Ruble significantly devalued in recent times and inflation in household commodities well into the double digits.
Their economy is damn close to collapsing, if the Western world has the collective will to keep arming the Ukranians.
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).
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.
The only car ad I can remember is the political one that had Mr Cameron in the role of some TV bloke.
It's already the most-used railway in the UK, with 220 million passenger journeys in 2023-24 - compared with the projected figure of just 200 million in 2030 that was used for the business case. Ten additional train sets have had to be ordered, as the current fleet of seventy are unlikely to be able to cope with the actual demand.
We seem to routinely under-estimate the value of new infrastructure, which must surely be part of the reason why we're so bad at actually building stuff. How do we fix this?
Bob the builder IIRC.
We routinely underestimate the value of rail at least because of treasury Green Book rules in how business cases can be used and what can and can't be assumed when putting together a business case. And (to simplify wildly) treasury rules severely limit what can be included in the benefits side of a benefit:cost ratio, especially around induced demand (i.e. infrastructure inducing people to make new trips where they did not do so before). So forecasters might be able to forecast rather more optimistically, but, given that those forecasts won't be accepted in the business case, the don't bother.
It's already the most-used railway in the UK, with 220 million passenger journeys in 2023-24 - compared with the projected figure of just 200 million in 2030 that was used for the business case. Ten additional train sets have had to be ordered, as the current fleet of seventy are unlikely to be able to cope with the actual demand.
We seem to routinely under-estimate the value of new infrastructure, which must surely be part of the reason why we're so bad at actually building stuff. How do we fix this?
Bob the builder IIRC.
We routinely underestimate the value of rail at least because of treasury Green Book rules in how business cases can be used and what can and can't be assumed when putting together a business case. And (to simplify wildly) treasury rules severely limit what can be included in the benefits side of a benefit:cost ratio, especially around induced demand (i.e. infrastructure inducing people to make new trips where they did not do so before). So forecasters might be able to forecast rather more optimistically, but, given that those forecasts won't be accepted in the business case, the don't bother.
You’re assuming the details of the green book are used in practice anyway. In reality it’s always just about political will vs. cash limits.
And I do mean cash - we pretend government works on resource based amounting, but it doesn’t really, everyone speaks as if they were cash accounting. I have often said we might as well be honest and revert.
Short debate on SLAPP lawsuits in the Commons, of which the UK is alleged to be a hub. It's like it was 2007.
A very interesting opening speech.
Describes a number of specific cases, some very large, where legal threats in the UK were used to attempt to impose silence.
One of which is mention of legal letters sent to Dan Neidle by one Nadhim Zahawi to stop him writing about several million £££ of taxes. (Mentioned in the Commons, so I can repeat here with no implications, I think)
Trump's D-List Defenders Have Dug Their Most Pathetic Trench Yet: Abuse of Power Is All Good https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a29560793/matthew-whitaker-abuse-of-power-not-a-crime-trump/ With all the twists and turns of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Presidency, you may have forgotten that Donald Trump, American president, once appointed as his acting attorney general a man who was previously a Big Dick Toilet Salesman. This is not a joke. In 2014, a firm called World Patent Marketing announced Matthew Whitaker was joining its board of directors. WPM claimed to help inventors get their patents approved and their products marketed, but allegedly just pocketed their money. (For this, the Federal Trade Commission fined the group $26 million and banned the founder from doing business in the field.)..
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).
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.
The only car ad I can remember is the political one that had Mr Cameron in the role of some TV bloke.
Good afternoon, everybody.
Good afternoon.
Labour ran an attack ad on Cameron in 2010, featuring a photoshopped image of him based on the character DCI Gene Hunt from the TV show ‘Life On Mars’, with the caption “Don’t let him lead Britain back to the 1980s” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8610054.stm
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).
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.
After a horse house a car will be the most expensive purchase that most people make. Of course it's a status symbol. Your very disdain for its status as a status symbol communicates that you are above superficial displays of status.
You're still peacocking, just in a different way.
Yes, I am above superficial displays of status. Is that supposed to be a bad thing now?
I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm just saying you're displaying what you judge as virtues and status to others in the same way. Just different virtues and status.
How else would like-minded people find each other?
Some people pretend to a superior morality by denigrating status symbols.
I'm not pretending to be superior. It's just that if you haven't figured out that the purpose of brand advertising is to make you overpay for stuff then you are going to get ripped off and have less money to spend on things that are genuinely useful to you. Is mine a virtuous position? Not really. I'd say it's just well-informed.
I know. But I'm still more likely to buy Warhammer models than Wargames Atlantic or Northstar. Sometimes the value for the consumer isn't in the physical object.
But isn't much of that because GW have made it impossible to use other companies figures in their games? I mean GW stuff is nice enough but it is really not better sculpted or produced than North Star, Foundry or Warlord Games. Which isn't that surprising given a lot of the same people sculpt the ranges.
Only in tournaments. You should see the Legohammer we do at home.
Haven't found something like this for any other state.
Except that the election was 17 days ago and they’re still f***ing counting votes.
Make America like Florida, at least in this regard. They had a full declaration in under three hours.
At least the hanging chad saga left a good legacy in Florida.
Indeed. Nothing in the US makes you want to improve your elections, like being dragged through the mud for two months when you’re the swing State in a 50-50 contest, and can’t come up with a result.
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).
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.
The only car ad I can remember is the political one that had Mr Cameron in the role of some TV bloke.
Good afternoon, everybody.
Good afternoon.
Labour ran an attack ad on Cameron in 2010, featuring a photoshopped image of him based on the character DCI Gene Hunt from the TV show ‘Life On Mars’, with the caption “Don’t let him lead Britain back to the 1980s” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8610054.stm
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).
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.
The only car ad I can remember is the political one that had Mr Cameron in the role of some TV bloke.
Good afternoon, everybody.
Good afternoon.
Labour ran an attack ad on Cameron in 2010, featuring a photoshopped image of him based on the character DCI Gene Hunt from the TV show ‘Life On Mars’, with the caption “Don’t let him lead Britain back to the 1980s” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8610054.stm
Trump's D-List Defenders Have Dug Their Most Pathetic Trench Yet: Abuse of Power Is All Good https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a29560793/matthew-whitaker-abuse-of-power-not-a-crime-trump/ With all the twists and turns of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Presidency, you may have forgotten that Donald Trump, American president, once appointed as his acting attorney general a man who was previously a Big Dick Toilet Salesman. This is not a joke. In 2014, a firm called World Patent Marketing announced Matthew Whitaker was joining its board of directors. WPM claimed to help inventors get their patents approved and their products marketed, but allegedly just pocketed their money. (For this, the Federal Trade Commission fined the group $26 million and banned the founder from doing business in the field.)..
If he wasn't allowed toilets, he probably had to do his business in the field.
Transport for London (TfL) has announced its intention to award the new Elizabeth line operator contract to GTS Rail Operations Limited, a joint venture between Go Ahead Group, Tokyo Metro and Sumitomo Corporation. The contract will cover seven years with an option to extend for up to two additional years.
GTS Rail Operations Limited will take over from the existing operator, MTR Corporation (Crossrail) Limited, in May 2025.
"The man said he would pay l to turn Newport into Dubai if he found the money."
Well he’s at least a couple of orders of magnitude out, if he thinks he can recreate anything close to Dubai for £569m.
What he actually wants is for the council to pay to dig up their own tip from a decade ago, in the vain hope that he can find a specific hard drive dumped in the domestic refuse, without use of a magnet that would destroy the data on the disk.
Comments
Suspect we are witnessing the end of that particular section of international law.
For no real reason, as well as the two Ferraris used for filming, they also brought along Mike Hawthorn's D-Type.
Which was rather wonderful to see. Lord knows how much it must be worth.
The response has to be catastrophic enough to make taking the first step unthinkable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_JdIpo4FAc
It's the sense of entitlement. I'm as strong a right-to-roam advocate you'll find, but I get extremely pissed off with people who disturb livestock, light fires, paint rocks on top of Munros, trash crops, fly drones and so on.
Engage your brain - you're sharing the space with others, some of whom depend on the land for their livelihoods, and therefore also share the responsibility for conserving the wildlife, safeguarding livestock and keeping the place looking beautiful.
You're also responsible for your own safety - don't put your dog among cows, carry a bivvy bag, tell someone where you are going, have clothing ready for a 6 hour wait for mountain rescue.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/21/icc-issues-arrest-warrant-for-benjamin-netanyahu-israel
Whether it is effective, or she is sawing off the branch she is sitting on, is something that we will find out with time.
(Though the latest leader is probably dead already)
London's new Elizabeth Line (shortly to be handed over to foreign management) has shaken up the list of Britain's most used stations.
- London Liverpool Street 94.5 million
- London Paddington 66.9 million
- Tottenham Court Road 64.2 million
- London Waterloo 62.5 million
- Stratford (London) 56.6 million
- London Victoria 50.8 million
- London Bridge 50.0 million
- Farringdon 46.0 million
- Bond Street 38.3 million
- London Euston 36.2 million
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/the-elizabeth-line-is-rewriting-the-uks-rail-station-usage-charts-77234/Semi active suspension is perhaps preferable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2_Black_Panther
..The Black Panther fields an advanced semi-active suspension system, called the in-arm suspension unit (ISU), which allows for individual control of every bogie on the tracks. This posture control function can tilt the chassis or lower the overall height by 40 centimeters (16 in). This allows the K2 to "sit", "stand" and "kneel", as well as "lean" towards one side or a corner. "Sitting" gives the tank a lower profile and offers superior handling over roads. "Standing" gives the vehicle higher ground clearance for maneuverability over rough terrain. "Kneeling" augments the angular range in which the tank's gun barrel can elevate and depress, allowing the vehicle to fire its main gun downhill as well as engage low-flying aircraft more effectively. The height adjustable suspension system detects rough road surface conditions in real time through the movement of the first road wheel in front and collects data, and the five road wheels in the rear automatically control the hydraulic pressure of the in-arm suspension unit and variable damper based on this terrain data to maintain optimal driving performance...
https://x.com/jstein_wapo/status/1859328656243556490
I don't want to overstate things but this via Musk and Ramaswamy suggest a serious intent to go through with major cuts to the federal workforce, via their new oped
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5000935-medicaid-cuts-potential-next-congress/
This looks headed to the Supreme Court, as I doubt Congresspeople - Republicans included - will want some of these cuts on their slate when they face re-election in the midterms.
https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5000307-trump-appoints-doge-efficiency/
...So how does this dynamic duo of non-official efficiency engineers propose to pull off their grand plans? Ramaswamy has mentioned a two-prong approach. First, defund all the government programs and entities that are operating without an authorization from Congress. As the Washington Post pointed out earlier this week, these range from veterans’ health care, drug development and opioid addiction treatment, the State Department and housing assistance, to the Justice Department, education spending, NASA, health care and student loans, international development and security assistance, and Head Start.
As congressional experts point out, the lack of a formal statutory authorization does not leave these entities naked; the appropriations bills that fund them have the dual purpose of also automatically continuing their statutory authority. Ramaswamy asserts that the president could achieve most of the goals unilaterally, ignoring the strictures of the Impoundment Control Act which gives Congress a veto over any spending cuts. Trump may attempt to repeal that act, but Ramaswamy argues that is unnecessary because it is already unconstitutional.
The Impoundment Control Act was enacted in 1974 as part of the Congressional Budget Act in response to President Richard M. Nixon’s practice of refusing to release funds for programs he opposed. The Impoundment Act requires Congress to approve presidential impoundments of funds in order for them to be rescinded (canceled). Because the Comptroller General, who is a creature of Congress, exercises certain executive authorities in administering the act, some say that renders the law unconstitutional...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2024/nov/21/john-prescott-dies-labour-deputy-prime-minister-tony-blair-uk-politics-live
Move aside Dura there's a new (spoddy, military equipment geeky) king in town.
Not really Dura's thing.
Also every American base with nuclear stuff, world wide, would have done various things.
It was press reports that said it was an RS-26...
"When the Russo-Ukrainian war ends, how much of Ukraine's territory would you prefer Russia control?"
None: 61%
Some: 5%
Half: 3%
Most: 3%
All: 1%
YouGov / Nov 19, 2024 / n=1595
https://x.com/USA_Polling/status/1859334198785396948
GOP source confirms: Gaetz ethics report to be leaked as early as today.
https://x.com/PabloReports/status/1857102771750576468
Allegedly contains some interesting photos.
https://x.com/huff4congress/status/1859073912392282180
“Hey Jaguar, I fixed your awful ad. It took two minutes”.
(Image of performance version of Jag saloon car, with attractive young lady in nightclub attire standing next to it).
A very interesting opening speech.
Describes a number of specific cases, some very large, where legal threats in the UK were used to attempt to impose silence.
One of which is mention of legal letters sent to Dan Neidle by one Nadhim Zahawi to stop him writing about several million £££ of taxes.
(Mentioned in the Commons, so I can repeat here with no implications, I think)
https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/dc56cc53-1093-41c5-8c57-57f53ede13bf?in=12:57:55
We seem to routinely under-estimate the value of new infrastructure, which must surely be part of the reason why we're so bad at actually building stuff. How do we fix this?
https://x.com/collinrugg/status/1859055717602238895
I suspect the main result of this will be making any attempt at real reform toxic for a generation.
=importhtml("https://electionresults.sos.ca.gov/returns/president","table",1,"en_US") (Works for Google sheets) generates live results direct from the Secretary of state website.
Haven't found something like this for any other state.
https://x.com/mylovanov/status/1859351261692428680
TL:DR, there’s record low unemployment and record high job vacancies, record high factory capacity utilisation.
GDP growth slowed to 3.1% in Q3, down from 4.1% in Q2 and 5.4% in Q1, stagflation is coming on steroids, with no growth predicted next year. Ruble significantly devalued in recent times and inflation in household commodities well into the double digits.
Their economy is damn close to collapsing, if the Western world has the collective will to keep arming the Ukranians.
Make America like Florida, at least in this regard. They had a full declaration in under three hours.
Good afternoon, everybody.
And I do mean cash - we pretend government works on resource based amounting, but it doesn’t really, everyone speaks as if they were cash accounting. I have often said we might as well be honest and revert.
And how Computer Weekly was the first publication to mention it.
That's interesting - it was CW who blew the lid on problems with Operation Ore 20 years ago.
Trump's D-List Defenders Have Dug Their Most Pathetic Trench Yet: Abuse of Power Is All Good
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a29560793/matthew-whitaker-abuse-of-power-not-a-crime-trump/
With all the twists and turns of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Presidency, you may have forgotten that Donald Trump, American president, once appointed as his acting attorney general a man who was previously a Big Dick Toilet Salesman. This is not a joke. In 2014, a firm called World Patent Marketing announced Matthew Whitaker was joining its board of directors. WPM claimed to help inventors get their patents approved and their products marketed, but allegedly just pocketed their money. (For this, the Federal Trade Commission fined the group $26 million and banned the founder from doing business in the field.)..
Labour ran an attack ad on Cameron in 2010, featuring a photoshopped image of him based on the character DCI Gene Hunt from the TV show ‘Life On Mars’, with the caption “Don’t let him lead Britain back to the 1980s”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8610054.stm
The Tories responded with the same image but leaning into the popular character. “Fire up the Quattro (sic*), it’s time for change”.
https://chris4copeland.blogspot.com/2010/04/labour-depict-david-cameron-as-gene.html
(*Audi trademarked the lower-case ‘q’ for ‘quattro’ back in the ‘80s)
I mean, on his way to power, he used the guys trying to tax international trade as his patsies. Then "took care of them". So no stupid tariffs.
Here is your DaveyCrockett MK14.7
We are only allowed one due to budget cuts.
Sorry...
Tom Homan makes clear that he's prepared to more or less go to war with cities that resist federal mass deportations
Every now and then the Daily Mail does find some genuinely funny and curious stories.
"Man sues Council to dig up his 569 million Bitcoin fortune he lost when his partner thew away his computer."
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14109325/Bitcoin-binbag-landfill-Wales-500m.html
"The man said he would pay l to turn Newport into Dubai if he found the money."
NEW THREAD
https://railuk.com/company-news/gts-rail-operations-limited-announced-as-new-operator-for-the-elizabeth-line/
Transport for London (TfL) has announced its intention to award the new Elizabeth line operator contract to GTS Rail Operations Limited, a joint venture between Go Ahead Group, Tokyo Metro and Sumitomo Corporation. The contract will cover seven years with an option to extend for up to two additional years.
GTS Rail Operations Limited will take over from the existing operator, MTR Corporation (Crossrail) Limited, in May 2025.
What he actually wants is for the council to pay to dig up their own tip from a decade ago, in the vain hope that he can find a specific hard drive dumped in the domestic refuse, without use of a magnet that would destroy the data on the disk.