What was the purpose of the recent Jaguar ad?

And what does it say about capitalism?

In case you’re lucky enough to have avoided the recent minor controversy surrounding Jaguar’s apparent rebranding, here’s the advert that set it off:

Hilarious, I’m sure you’ll agree, and not a car in sight. Until the Jaguar logo appears 27 seconds into the 30 second advertisement, it could just as easily be an ad for perfume, clothes or Sony Bravia TVs. The closest it comes to mentioning cars is a car-like shape with a cloth artfully draped over it - which the diverse cast are revealed to have been sitting on, so it can’t be car-sized - left on screen under the Jaguar logo. Online commentators have speculated that the rebrand refers to Jaguar either releasing some electric cars or going fully electric (apparently a big reveal of a new design has been promised for December 2), but none of that is stated in the commercial.

Perhaps the funniest part of it is that Jaguar are launching this advertising campaign under the slogan Copy Nothing, and to do that they’ve created some content that is itself painfully derivative and unoriginal, and which has no connection whatsoever to what Jaguar actually does. Although Jaguar didn’t release any images of new cars as part of this campaign, they did release a handful of teaser photos of bits of car trim and their new branding.

The message seems to be that Jaguar is now more of a brand than a car company. It’s like a neat metaphor for what financialisation does to an economy, turning everything into a representation of material value, while the thing that actually generates the value is ignored, perhaps even considered a little vulgar.

Online, Jaguar owners were up in arms about this rebrand, because it is such a reversal - many even called it a betrayal - of what Jaguar has hitherto represented. Almost overnight, Jaguar went from being the home of sexy James Bond cars to being yet another faceless, soulless, pastel-coloured corporate brand, scared to offend or excite anyone. They’ve gone from exuding danger to exuding safety, which, much as we all might enjoy being safe, is also inherently boring. This was the top comment under the video on Jaguar’s Facebook page:

The most common reactions were laughter and sadness, the top-voted comment was intensely critical, and Jaguar’s utterly insipid reply about a “new creative philosophy” got primarily laughed and cried at. I believe that’s what kids these days call ‘getting ratioed’.

Although making this ad in practice would have been dirt cheap - apart from post-production all you’d need is a studio, eight models and some outfits that a first-year fashion student could design - the advertising agency that made it probably charged a lot to do it, and the cost of getting it shown on TV and streaming is considerable. Whoever commissioned this presumably knew what they were doing, and what effect they wanted it to have - so what was that effect?

My instinctive and cynical reaction was suspicion that someone might have shorted Tata (Jaguar’s parent company) stocks, knowing that the campaign would cause a backlash, but that’s pure conjecture and apparently the stock price has already recovered. Then there’s the old adage of “no such thing as bad publicity”, since the campaign has undoubtedly got people talking about Jaguar, but in the case of luxury items where the perception of value is the value, that doesn’t feel like a satisfactory answer either.

It might seem hard to believe that Jaguar genuinely thought the campaign would attract new customers or please existing ones. Are there really customers out there who want a Jaguar, but find its masculine image a turn-off? Maybe there are, but there are also many, many owners of Jaguars who’ve pledged online not to buy another one as a result of the Copy Nothing campaign. Do Jaguar/Tata think the customers they attract will outweigh the ones they lose?

Perhaps they really do. To the average person on the street the rebrand might look absurd and comical, but the disconnect between those of us living and working in the real world, and those whose careers and reputations are tied to share prices, is a real thing. There are people who have absorbed the empty language of advertising and marketing as if it carried meaning because it has been associated with successful brands, and now that language and those symbols have become the meaning, in a kind of perverse parody of what language is supposed to do. It’s a sort of corporate superstition, a form of spirituality for those who have embraced capitalism as their raison d’être, and if that sounds bleak, it’s because it is.

While working for a relatively small but publicly-traded company, I once attended one of the regular ‘Town Hall’ (ugh) meetings that the executive team hosted. One of the company executives had prepared a series of slides in which he compared the company’s growth to climbing a mountain. The first step, he said, was “stabilising the patient”. So… we’re in a hospital saving a patient now? The second step was “reaching base camp” - so we’re back to climbing a mountain? What about the patient? Are they coming with us up the mountain after they were just at death’s door, or are we abandoning them? Seems like irresponsible behaviour either way, or more accurately, like a load of mixed metaphors and incoherent nonsense.

Nonetheless, the person delivering this said it all like he really meant it, and the other big cheeses on the call acted like this was deep and insightful. The only time I got a hint of any real emotion was when the executive stressed the importance of “killing” and “murdering” the next market segment - whoa dude, take it easy, you’re giving uncomfortable American Psycho vibes.

And that’s when it hit me. The language of marketing is doing what the sanitising language of imperalism does, because the goals are the same. The purpose is not to express meaning, the purpose is to obscure meaning, because the meaning itself is so mundane and ultimately barbaric: take more. More growth, more sales, more land, more whatever. The C-suite are merely the interface between the dispassionate algorithm of capital, and the human workforce that have to be motivated to keep the company growing, always growing, so that investors continue to see a return on their investment.

At some point, that algorithm must be coming from somewhere, beyond even the investors: the demiurge, that sees increasing capital as its only motivation. It’s something close to a demonic force, that possesses and animates humans but is not human itself, because it always wants more and can never be sated. That force is what drove Jaguar to apparently humiliate themselves for the benefit of investors; it knows something we don’t. When we look at advertising that superficially resembles art but has no depth or pretence to actual meaning, we are looking at the demiurge, and we understand instinctively that it is terrifying, because we recognise its fundamental inauthenticity, and know that it is ultimately alien and unknowable.

“Buy a car”

Republished at The Revolution Report.