Marketing and Advertising

Apt Analogy of the Month: Jaguar’s Suicidal Ad=Kamala Harris’s Campaign

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

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.

Trans-Mania Loses Disney But Gains…Jaguar?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

What’s going on here?

A couple of things, I think. The two ethics issues are trustworthiness and competence.

Apparently Jaguar has decided that it is within the mission of a car manufacturer to promote transsexuals and other forms of dubious sexuality. Or maybe clowns, based on the characters above that inhabit the company’s very strange ad. Have you seen it? No?

Here you go….

That’s right, no mention of driving, cars, or anything related to transportation. This is a cognitive dissonance scale maneuver for someone seeking a ridiculously narrow market. The ad says “being sexually ambiguous is cool.” Is it? I don’t think so; I think being sexually ambiguous is a problem. Like many minorities with problems, I understand the urge to insist that the problem is really an advantage and a badge of honor, something to take pride in, but why is Jaguar making that argument at the expense of promoting their product?

The ad is propaganda tinged with virtue-signalling for those who think extreme advocacy for marginal sexual identities is virtuous. I don’t regard it as virtuous. I regard this ad as a company abusing its influence by presuming to indoctrinate the public to achieve an interest group’s agenda. Meanwhile, the ad is incompetent advertising, since it doesn’t promote the product the company is supposed to be selling.

At least when Bud Light decided to promote transsexuals while marketing beer, the beer was somewhere in evidence. For all we know after watching that Jaguar ad, the new Jaguar looks like a Stanley Steamer.

And the Great Stupid is still rolling on…

“Holy Fuck” Indeed. Stereotyping? What’s That? [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Update: This video may be a parody, which raises further ethical issues that I discuss in the follow-up post. For now, I will leave this as written.]

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The most incompetent Presidential campaign in modern history hits a new low, raising the question, “How low can it go?” In addition to the hilarious selection of actors (these are all actors, you know, although that guy talking about how much weight he can lifts is terrible) to represent manly men, the ad is predicated on the theory that men are morons and won’t be turned off by the demeaning stereotypical assumptions it represents.

The equivalent ad aimed at women would have Vegas showgirls, strippers and Sydney Sweeney talking about the rights of the unborn.

What an insult. And what an indictment of Harris’s advisors and staff.

The Fake James Earl Jones Problem

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Oh yeah, I can see where this is going…

Vanity Fair reports that in 2022, Lucasfilm and Skywalker Sound hired a Ukrainian startup called Respeech to recreate Darth Vader’s voice for its upcoming mini-series “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” The recently departed James Earl Jones was then alive but 91 and his voice was waeker and not as resonant as in his “THIS is CNN!” days. Using AI, Respeech used archived “Star Wars” sound tracks footage to recreate Jones’ iconic Darth Vader’s tones from the original 1980s trilogy. Jones was satsified with the fake version of him, and signed off on using his archival voice recordings for future (lousy) “Star Wars” spin-offs. When “Obi-Wan Kenobi” premiered, nobody guessed that Darth Vader’s voice was AI generated.

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Harris Is Losing the Meme Wars, So Naturally Democrats Want To Censor Memes

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Who would have expected the AI metaphorical tidal wave to have an influence on the Presidential election? Memes are a breeze to make using artificial intelligence, and while I got heartily sick of my Facebook friends bombarding me with political ones, I have to admit that the technology has the silver lining of taking blunt and biased punditry out of the political cartoonist monopoly and letting some very witty people make satirical political statements.

So far, at least, it appears that conservatives have mastered meming before the Left has, and in this race for President, that is having impact, though how much and how significant is impossible to tell. However, it is clear that the Kamala-Harris-as-a-Communist memes are getting under the skin of some Democrats—one of my Trump-Deranged relatives was complaining about those just yesterday—and so now there are calls for “something to be done” about anti-Harris memes. On MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show,” NPR’s Maria Hinojosa was very upset about AI images of Harris presented in Maoist uniforms:

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My Trip To Walgreen’s: A Nation of Assholes, 2024

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

One of the posts I have most frequently referred to was this, in which I predicted that if Donald Trump was elected President, the entire culture would coarsen, become more uncivil, and, in essence, “rot from the head down.” And I was right, though I did not predict that that the Left’s anger at Hillary’s shock defeat and its eight year determination to destroy Trump “by any means necessary” would play such a large role in the process. After all, it was a Democratic member of the House (and a woman!) who said, “Let’s impeach the motherfucker!” It was another one who urged “the resistance” to make themselves obnoxious by confronting members of Trump’s administration on the street. Robert DeNiro, an anti-Trump fanatic, has been the most publicly vulgar celebrity by far and far more MAGA cap wearers have been the victims of assaults and confrontations than purveyors of it: people like Jussie Smollett have had to manufacture pro-Trump attacks.

Then again, the Right is responsible for a popular coded chant that means, “Fuck Joe Biden.”

Whatever the reason, The Coarsening, as it would be called if this were a horror movie, has come. I just did an ethics program for a federal agency that asked me to concentrate on civility, because it was deteriorating there.

All of which brings me to my trip to Walgreen’s today.

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More Election Ad Deceit in NH

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Former Senator Kelly Ayotte is the GOP candidate for Governor of New Hampshire. She is also one of the long-time Roe v. Wade opponents who is being targeted by pro-abortion groups in attack ads. If you listen closely, some of the ads reveal the dark and ominous heart of the ‘We Love Abortion!’ movement.

I have had to watch one such ad repeatedly while following the Boston Red Sox as they are just-barely contending for a wild card berth. A sad-eyed mother reveals that when she was pregnant, a doctor who checked out the embryo (that was well past the usual legal abortion period in many states including New Hampshire) told the mother that “my baby would not survive.” She goes on to say that Ayotte is so cruel that she would make a mother like me “carry” a baby for months knowing that “it would not survive.” Ayotte supports the current 24 week limit on abortions.

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Promoting Your Institution By Emphasizing the Most Negative Perspective On Its History: Good Plan, U.Va!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m not certain what to call this, and solicit your suggestions. Incompetence? Woke virtue signaling? Self-hate? Betrayal? Insanity?

The Jefferson Council, an organization of conservative University of Virginia alumni, has criticized the recent tone of the school’s student-run campus tours that are supposed to convince prospective applicants and their families that U.Va is the place for the graduating high school students to continue their education. The tour organization, the University Guide Service, has been alienating prospective students, the Council says, by immersing the hopeful, bright-eyed young idealists with a “woke version of U.Va history.”

The cheerful tale of the storied university’s origins, the alumni complain, begins by describing how the university’s land was stolen from the Monacan Indian tribe, then goes on to describe how the Rotunda (above) designed by Thomas Jefferson as the center of campus, was constructed by slave labor. They believe that a tour for prospective students should emphasize Jefferson’s positive contributions to the nation, like, oh, authoring the mission statement for this great democratic experiment, his indispensable contribution to securing American independence, his achievements as the third President of the United States, his brilliance and an architect and inventor, those little details. There was nothing unusual about using slave labor when the University of Virginia was established in 1819. Why would an institution emphasize that in a promotional tour?

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A Brief Note On Insurance Agent Incompetence…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Yesterday, as the entry into a credit company debacle that I plan to write about later today (which, as you know, doesn’t mean that I will), about an hour of my workday was taken up listening to a pitch from a representative of Mutual of Omaha trying to sell me on taking out an home equity loan with the company.

I finally answered the phone call with company’s caller ID because I had not answered about 20 earlier calls, and also because I wasn’t sure why the company was calling me. I explained that yes, I do need cash for many things and yes, I have a lot of equity in the home I’ve been paying the mortgage on for 43 years. I also explained that I have no skills in finance or money generally, am swamped in the wake of my wife’s sudden death, and literally don’t know who to trust or listen to.

He said, “Well, we’re a large, well-respected company with an impressive track record in our field.” I had to wrestle my tongue to the ground to avoid saying, “Yeah, my business involves analyzing all the clever and not-so-clever ways companies like yours lie, cheat and steal.” “You’ve heard of Mutual of Omaha, I assume?” he continued.

“Oh, sure,” I said. “I was aware of Mutual of Omaha even before Henry Fonda started doing commercials for you.” I’m pretty sure he had no idea who Henry Fonda was.

Then he said, “Believe me, with Mutual of Omaha, you’re in good hands.”

I couldn’t wrestle my tongue to the ground after that gaffe.

“Wait,” I said. You just gave me the Allstate slogan. Now I’m completely confused. Next you’ll be telling me that Mutual of Omaha will be there for me “like a good neighbor.”

This is a special category of incompetence that you just don’t see very often. It’s like a Democrat saying that their party wants to make America great again. But the laugh was almost worth the time I wasted listening to the guy.

Almost.

From the Toxic Popular Culture Files: Smalls Cat Food

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

J.D. Vance’s much maligned “cat ladies” snark , like many furiously slammed comments by conservatives and Republicans are, may have focused attention on to a societal trend seriously threatening the health of American society. (If only he could have articulated it better.)

Lately I have been bombarded with TV ads for Smalls cat food. The promotions and commercials claim that it is “human grade” cat food, and why not, since the TV spots feature disturbed individuals male and female, not just proclaiming these animal companions as their surrogates for children, but literally stating that they are children. “He’s my son,” a young woman says in one ad, speaking of her cat. “She’s literally my baby!” says some guy, also talking about a feline “fur-baby.” Literally!

This would be funny in a mordant way if it were not so ominous. I can’t blame cat food companies for taking advantage of the apocalyptic collision of progressive anti-family attitudes in the U.S. and pet mania: so many people do come to regard a dog or a cat as cheaper, more predictable, less demanding equivalent of a child. What is disturbing about the Smalls commercials is that they represent this mindset as healthy and normal.

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