Ann Althouse gets the pointer for finding this: Giles Coren of the London Times wrote in “I take Jaguar’s woeful woke rebrand personally/From heritage British cars to classroom lessons, there’s always one demographic under attack — the middle classes” …
“And Jaguar’s answer to the crapness of a car they can no longer persuade middle-aged, middle-class, professional family men to buy? Improve the car? Persuade the men? Or, wait, try to sell it instead to anorexic, teenage, intersex manga fans of colour, because they might just be stupid enough to fall for it? Except the ad’s not for them, is it? Like most adverts now, this is a story of rich white heterosexuals selling stuff to other rich white heterosexuals, using images of multi-ethnic, pansexual, differently abled humans in order to appear progressive, without actually doing or changing anything…. The ads stand for NOTHING…. They are born of a contempt for the middle of society, which is conceived at the top with the imagined complicity of the bottom. It’s pure Kamala Harris. It’s ‘joy.’ It is the sort of thing that got Trump elected: a small number of ivory tower wokeists alienating the middle class and pushing nice people further and further to the right.”
Bingo! What a perfect analogy: they should show the Jaguar silliness on talking head shows every time a progressive propagandist says Trump won because of sexism and racism, or because the voters are stupid. Would anyone smart buy a Jaguar based on that ad? (EA posted on it last week.)
Meanwhile, the meme-makers and parodists have been having a ball mocking the thing, while Jaguar’s managing director, Rawdon Glover, has described criticism of its incompetent marketing campaign as “vile hatred and intolerance,” saying that its message has been lost in “a blaze of intolerance.” Sounds exactly like Rob Reiner, The View, and all of my bitter Facebook friends, doesn’t he? Jaguar is a corporate hypocrite as well: it has been pointed out that most obvious transsexual model in the ad was cut out of the version showing in the Middle East.
For your early Sunday viewing pleasure, here are a couple of the parodies I could embed. (There’s another one where a rampaging jaguar attacks the models.) But the real ad is funnier than any parody, especially when one considers that its makers thought it would sell luxury cars.
Ethics Alarms 
“There’s another one where a rampaging jaguar attacks the models.”
Were you not able to post the TikTok video because it was no longer available?
If THIS is the…um…Marketing Guru behind all this (FF to 03:30), some questions have been answered.
PWS
This MGUY Australia is a HOOT!
PWS
WordPress lets me embed YouTube and not much else.
You are the Jaguars owned by Ford now.
Ford sold Jaguar and Land Rover to TaTa Motors in India several years ago.
TaTa Motors is affiliated with the TaTa Group, who’ve rubbed elbows with a cabal of Climate Criminals Extraordinaire, not the least of whom was former IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachuari
Four (4) more connections to get to Kevin Bacon…
PWS
There’s a good one for Blue Sky where the verb in all the taglines is cry.
Well, the only car I see this ad selling are Maseratis. Jaguars aren’t cutting edge performance, they aren’t cutting edge reliability, and they aren’t cutting edge in technology. What they are is NOT BMW or Audi. Some English buy Jaguars because they are British (India WAS British, right?), but most people buy them because everyone else in the parking lot has a BMW or an Audi. You know who ELSE isn’t BMW or Audi? Maserati. Maserati needs to get on this and make an ad with an attractive, well-dressed man driving fast on a winding road with fantastic engine noises. After the Maserati informational screen, it goes back to the Maserati pulling up to a fancy restaurant for valet parking and the man helping an attractive woman out of the passenger seat.
Excellent thoughts.
A few years ago while riding my bicycle to work one morning I was passed by a Maserati GranTurismo S. Not only was the car a gorgeous dark blue, but even at low speed, the engine sound was unmistakable, unforgettable, and magical.
Of course, Maserati has plans to phase out combustion engines in the next decade as well. Hopefully, they will read the tea leaves – the dwindling desire for EVs and slowing sales – and change their minds.
For time out of mind, the heart and soul of a Jaguar was the engine. The legendary inline six of the E-Type, the twelve cylinder that powered some E-Types and XJs, and numerous V8s…all of them were sonorous and most were powerful and a joy to drive. The rest of the car may have been traditional “British-unreliable,” but the engines were great.
Jaguar’s decision to devote itself to 100% electric power in ’26 removes from the lineup the one distinction the car possessed. What remains is a lineup of vehicles with suspect reliability and no real attraction to historical drivers of the car.
This is strictly my opinion, but the company will need to appeal to a new market because traditional Jaguar buyers will move to marks that still offer a great engine. So with that in mind, it feels logical to go woke and commit to virtue signaling as a desperate appeal to the young lefties addicted to the perceived reality of climate change. Frankly, that segment is the only one that will save Jaguar. In that sense, they are going woke in an attempt to keep from going broke.
I bet it fails in spectacular fashion.
Didn’t anyone study the Bud Light catastrophe in business school or in other board rooms? Like Bud Light, Jaguar has evidently been losing market share. But why did Jaguar think doing a Dylan Mulvaney would work for them when it failed so spectacularly at Budweiser? Maybe like beer, tweedy cars like Jags are simply timing out of the market.
More Info on and comments by the “guru” responsible for this (includes text of the video linked by PWS in first comment, above). It reads like it could have been written as satirical mocking fiction describing a cartoonishly outre’ gay guy, and what he might do if put in charge of marketing performance automobiles. (…and with a staff of 800??? …another What The Hell? question in this mess.)
Like most adverts now, this is a story of rich white heterosexuals selling stuff to other rich white heterosexuals, using images of multi-ethnic, pansexual, differently abled humans in order to appear progressive, without actually doing or changing anything…
Recently, it was mentioned on this blog that furries were accepted by the “LGBTQ community.” First off there is no such thing as community here. Most gays can’t stand bisexuals and most trans don’t like gays. But let’s get to the real shit here.
The people who always have and always will sign off on supposed “edgy” lifestyles and content like this has always been what my wife and I refer to as the elite, bored, rich, and white. Ever heard of the term “academic lesbian?” Learn about it and the picture starts to become clear.
Bored affluent white straight people have completely taken over what used to be the gays rights movement. Let’s be honest here. A trans man married to a trans woman is a heterosexual couple with extra window dressing. We’re seeing more and more of this. Teen girls who identify as “soft gay boys” are often girls who fetishize gay men, thinking of them in vague categories that cover for a girl’s insecurities around boys. Furries are definitely a straight thing…mostly.
This phenomenon isn’t new. The 90’s and 2000’s were filled with women proclaiming they were bisexual when they never had or wanted a same sex kiss.
The absolute worst for me in terms of race have been the bored, white, and affluent, especially academic, types. Asking me how I feel about some issue as a “woman of color” as I if represent some single group or culture. It’s beyond rude. It’s an attempt to find meaning and mystery in a mascot. It’s the worst kind of woke because it’s cloaked as “allyship” and “affirmation.”
It’s not wacky homos that are into this crap. There is no community that signs off on ads like this. Weirdo straights get a free pass from blogs like this and others who won’t bother to look past some crappy label most of us didn’t ask for. I’m glad Althouse made this incredibly important point.
1. There are no blogs like this.
2. As I am not a member of any community, I only know what I’m told about “furries”—my son, now daughter, who has at various times been gay, bisexual, very heterosexual, and now trans, also went through a “furry” phase, so I was relying on his/her/their expertise. It’s a mostly straight thing? Good to know.
3. I can’t find that point Althouse made: what was it? As far as I can see she thought the Jaguar ad was just attention-seeking crap. Which is hardly a trenchant point.
Still a Comment of the Day.
As usual.
Political provocateur StoneToss (who is a performative racist/homophobe) predicted this years ago with the linked comic. Just don’t browse around that site if you’re easily offended.
https://stonetoss.com/comic/burger-kang/