The new Jaguar campaign is either terrible advertising or brilliant marketing. Which is it?

What’s your opinion of THAT Jaguar advert? Come on, you must have one. You can’t sit on the fence with this ad.

You’ve got two options. It’s either the biggest piece of woke crap you’ve ever seen in your life, or it’s a bold evolutionary step forward in Jaguar’s brand identity. There’s no middle ground here.

Let’s deal with the ‘woke crap’ argument first. This Jaguar advert has annoyed everyone you would expect it to annoy. Nigel Farage. The Daily Mail. GB News. It’s yet another example, Farage complains, of the modern advertising industry destroying a great British brand. Farage finishes his 45-second invective by predicting that Jaguar will go bust - and it deserves to.

I’m also mindful of the fact that, in writing this short article on the Jaguar advert, I’m adding to the endless stream of hot takes from marketing executives on LinkedIn. And everyone has a take. It’s exhausting.

The outrage about Jaguar’s rebrand stems from the fact that it should be a luxury British car brand. This advert has torn up that brand identity by its roots. It’s not immediately clear what audience the new branding is aimed for.

Plus, the advert doesn’t feature any cars.

The copywriting is terrible

Again, we should caveat what I’m about to say with the fact that we haven’t seen Jaguar’s real car ad yet, but the copywriting for this video was quite generic. I realise that the ‘copy nothing’ tagline was meant to be a nod to Jaguar’s origins, but some of the other taglines in the video run the risk of Jaguar’s brand becoming a repository for meaningless verbiage: “live vivid” and “create exuberant”.

Car adverts have inspired some of the best advertising copywriting in the industry. There’s a reason why David Ogilvy’s Rolls Royce advert is still one of the most celebrated of all time. It grounded the product in clear, tangible benefits that the customer could imagine and feel.

It’s unclear who Jaguar’s audience is

With this initial advert, it seems like Jaguar is going for a general vibe of ‘modernity.’ The people featured in the advert are designed to embody diversity, originality and creative flair. But I agree with the advert’s critics when they say there’s no relatability. Why exactly is this an advert for a type of car and not a new boutique fashion brand?

Again, let’s assume that this is early days and that Jaguar is embarking on a general awareness-building campaign. Eventually, its new electric cars will need buyers. Who are they? What do they want? How does Jaguar intend to activate them?

Then there’s the British dimension. For good or ill, Jaguar has always had a British-centric brand. The new advert seems intent on dialling down this element of Jaguar’s positioning.

Alas, I don’t have half a million pounds just lying about so I’m very much not one of Jaguar’s target buyers. But I’ve signed up for the rest of the marketing campaign anyway. Maybe it’s a marketing campaign that will reap dividends for Jaguar two years from now. Or maybe it really is flushing a great British car brand down the toilet.

There probably isn’t a middle ground.