On the menu today: Sure, on the surface, it’s just another silly car commercial, likely created by some out-of-touch, super-woke ad agency full of creative minds who are really interested in selling a particular cultural image and not so interested in selling actual cars. But dig a little deeper, and it’s a fascinating demonstration that not everyone in the corporate world thought there were any lessons to be learned from the experience of Bud Light.
A Tone-Deaf Ad
Palm Beach, Fla. — Our Andrew Stuttaford addressed this topic first, but the new ad from Jaguar is such a spectacular artifact of 2016-2022 “woke culture” that it deserves another look.
Sullen faced, racially diverse, vaguely androgynous models, wearing outlandish, brightly colored clothing, emerge from a yellow elevator onto a vast hot-pink moonscape. They dance a bit, paint some white stripes — one holds a sledgehammer — as the words “create exuberant,” “live vivid,” “delete ordinary,” and “break moulds,” appear on the screen. The models assemble on a bench-like rock, then rise and walk offscreen.
Nothing in the ad explicitly refers to LGBTQ+ (and whatever else goes into the acronym these days) culture, but it sure seems to be pointing to it in the subtext.
“Copy nothing,” Jaguar declares, offering up an commercial that looks like a rip-off of an old Benetton ad, featuring the bizarre fashion you could find at any show on a Milan or Paris runway, featuring familiar and vaguely androgynous faces we’ve seen all over pop culture. (After a bit of digging, I saw people comparing the fashions in the commercial to the work of Alexander McQueen, who died in 2010.)
InsideEVs offers a revealing defense against the argument that this is a “woke” commercial: “Jaguar’s new direction feels pretty much in line with any luxury fashion house marketing campaign from any point in time from 2021 onward.” Yes, that’s the point — the ad telling us to “copy nothing” is offering the same image as every other high-end avant-garde cultural elite for the past half decade.
At least when Apple told people to think different, it used old black-and-white footage, which stood out from other commercials; and it’s not like you saw Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Muhammad Ali, Ted Turner, Maria Callas, Jim Henson, and Gandhi in a lot of TV commercials. That ad didn’t show any computers or phones, but it did boldly and clearly offer up Apple’s ethos: “While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
Let’s just point out the perfect timing. Jaguar’s ad team chose to unveil this dramatic new rebranding — the press release shouts “FEARLESS. EXUBERANT. COMPELLING” — on November 18. Again, while nothing about the commercial explicitly says “woke” or “genderfluid,” it certainly gives off those vibes. And Jaguar chooses to unveil this roughly two weeks after Donald Trump wins reelection with coattails in the House and Senate, effectively declaring the end of the “woke” era. This is like releasing a new disco album two weeks after July 12, 1979, “The Night That Disco Died.”
The new Jaguar ad also, as Elon Musk and others noticed, doesn’t feature a car.
Those of you with long memories may remember Nissan Infiniti ads that didn’t show the car, but instead featured pastoral scenes of landscapes. I can’t find the exact ad I have in mind, but the “Flock of Geese” commercial was in the let’s-not-show-the-car-and-just-talk-philosophy vein. An old article cited the comment as coming from an ad executive, but I seem to remember it coming from Jay Leno: “The car isn’t selling, but sales of rocks and trees are way up.”
For what it’s worth, Jaguar is also unveiling a new electric vehicle that . . . as far as we can tell from the teaser image, looks like art deco architecture.
I’m not an expert on advertising, but Lulu Cheng Meservey is, and she concludes, “From a purely strategic perspective, this brand marketing is disastrous for Jaguar”:
This campaign is about “collaborating with a collective of original creators across the arts,” according to Jaguar’s website, which has been taken over by the rebrand. That message is roughly the opposite of what Jaguar should be saying, which is some version of “our cars are engineered to the gills and go very very fast.” Art school grads simply aren’t associated with elite engineering ability, I’m sorry. It’s possible a marketing exec read too many think pieces about how millennials shop based on values and forgot that people want cars that are really well built.
She adds, “Instead of choosing a clear lane, Jaguar’s brand has meandered further into no man’s land. Literally — this is NOT for men. While men have been an important audience for Jaguar historically (it’s a favored ride for James Bond and Bruce Wayne), the latest campaign features six women and two people of indistinguishable gender (one appears to be a man, but I don’t want to assume). If they’re going to abandon the male audience, they should replace it with a more lucrative audience, and it’s unclear who they’re going for here. Vegans?”
Yes. I don’t want to speak for all straight males — or even all late-40s, 6’2″, straight white males — but nothing in this commercial — avant-garde fashion, the sullen expressions on the vaguely androgynous faces, the declaration that without their product my life isn’t exuberant, vivid, or extraordinary enough — appeals to me or makes me want to buy that brand of car. And remember, Jaguars are luxury cars that start at around $50,000 for the bare-bones models but go well into the high five-figures and into the six-figures. If I’m going to plunk down a small fortune on a luxury car, it had better be off-the-charts awesome in both its performance and its image. A high-end Jaguar F-Type can run $115,000. For that kind of money, I want the Batmobile.
In a recent interview, secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth says of the Pentagon, “On the recruiting side, what you’ve done is you Bud Lighted yourself.”
To a conservative, the phrase “they Bud Lighted themselves” is abundantly clear. They let their image be remade by a far-left individuals who didn’t understand the institution’s original purpose, mission, or appeal, and found themselves alienating a vast swath of their previous supporters, with little or no offsetting appeal to the very small demographic that the new image is supposed to win over.
And in case you’re wondering, no, Bud Light sales never recovered. This July, the Wall Street Journal reported:
Bud Light’s star is still falling more than a year after a boycott turned the U.S. beer industry upside down. The former favorite has tumbled to the No. 3 spot behind Modelo Especial and Michelob Ultra, recent sales data show.
Bud Light represented 6.5% of beer dollar sales in U.S. stores in the four weeks ended July 6, compared with 7.3% for Michelob Ultra and 9.7% for Modelo, according to an analysis of NielsenIQ data by the consulting firm Bump Williams. . . .
Though Donald Trump in February gave the beer a surprise endorsement, Bud Light’s sales have continued to fall, in part because U.S. retailers have reduced the amount of shelf space allocated to the brand.
Not even Peyton Manning and Emmitt Smith, Shane Gillis, Post Malone, or a scholarship program for the children of first responders could help save Bud Light beer sales. In October, analysts at Citibank have bluntly assessed, “Bud Light sales are never going to recover,” but recommended clients buy shares of Anheuser-Busch InBev because of lower costs and ongoing strong margin expansion.
I passed a Jaguar dealership here in Palm Beach — think the guys selling the cars there are loving this new rebrand and new commercial?
The online left has no idea how small it is, demographically, in a country of 337 million people and roughly 154 million voters. It is likely that both online and offline, they spend time around like-minded people — perhaps extremely like-minded people — and have no idea how they come across to people who don’t already agree with them. And then, when confronted with disagreement, their first instinct is to get the disagreeing person removed in some way: reported to HR, fired, or banned from a platform. And if that fails . . . they leave X and flee to Bluesky.
ADDENDUM: I’m usually the one asking questions during an interview, but Shelley Hymes hosts a fascinating podcast series, Lunch with Shelley, and last week we met for a wide-ranging interview — everything from reporting in Washington to Kyiv to Taipei to how 9/11 shaped my worldview to accidentally blowing off Bob Costas and a bit of my Donald Trump and Bill Clinton impressions.
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