Jaguar boss defends new ad and rebrand amid ‘vile hatred’ online
The boss of Jaguar has defended the company’s move away from “traditional automotive stereotypes” after a clip of its new advert was met with a barrage of “vile hatred and intolerance” online.This week, Jaguar Land Rover, the luxury UK carmaker owned by India’s Tata Motors, posted a 30-second clip on X featuring models in brightly coloured clothing set against equally vibrant backdrops, without a car or the company’s traditional cat logo.“If we play in the same way that everybody else does, we’ll just get drowned out.So we shouldn’t turn up like an auto brand,” Jaguar’s managing director, Rawdon Glover told the Financial Times of the company’s “copy nothing” campaign.The new ad and rebrand prompted a backlash online, including on X where the platform’s chief executive, Elon Musk, posted: “Do you sell cars?”In response, Glover said, “Yes.
We’d love to show you”, and invited Musk to Miami next month where the company is presenting a public installation for the rebrand at Miami art week,Glover told the FT that while the response to the campaign, which drew more than 160m views on social media, had been “very positive” he said he was disappointed by the “vile hatred and intolerance” in the comments towards those featured in the video,“This is a reimagining that recaptures the essence of Jaguar, returning it to the values that once made it so loved, but making it relevant for a contemporary audience,” said Jaguar’s chief creative officer, Gerry McGovern,Britain’s largest automotive employer – officially known as JLR – while slower than its rivals to embrace electric vehicles, has made investments recently to build hybrid cars and prepare for electric vehicle production, starting with the first deliveries of the electric Range Rover, made in its main factory in Solihull, in the West Midlands, at the end of next year,James Ramsden, the executive creative director at the London design agency Coley Porter Bell, said the rebrand was a “radical reinvention” of a business wanting to appeal to a new generation.
“It’s just a shame it walked away from some of the iconic, treasured, and beautiful icons that have occupied the brand’s DNA for generations,” Ramsden told Adweek.“If you’re going to ‘break the mould’, you’d better have one hell of a range of cars full of innovations and shape language, with a new buyer experience, ready to roll … this we wait to see.”
The Guide #166: If 2024 is the year of the podcast, here’s what still sucks about the medium
What a year it has been for the podcast, which has a decent shot at being considered the most important cultural medium of 2024. Once the scrappy underdog of broadcasting, podcasts now sell out arenas and set the political agenda. They are inescapable.They are also at times teeth-grindingly annoying. We first shared our podcast pet peeves – from live episodes to paying for pods – a few years ago, but since then the irritations have only piled up further
Seth Meyers on Trump: ‘His staffing picks have been obscene’
Late-night hosts expressed surprise and glee as Matt Gaetz withdrew himself from the attorney general confirmation process.The Late Night host Seth Meyers said that Trump’s presidential comeback hit its “first major roadblock” with his pick for attorney general taking himself out of the process.Matt Gaetz removed himself after just eight days with Meyers joking that “once again, he can’t even make it to 18”.The “accused sexual predator” had already been in the centre of a scandal involving sex with a 17-year-old and was now being accused of the same thing with another teenager.Gaetz “saw the writing on the wall” and stepped down after he was asked to respond to the second allegation
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Stephen Colbert on Trump: ‘Continuing to shovel steaming piles of nominee into his cabinet’
Late-night hosts talked Donald Trump’s nomination of Dr Mehmet Oz to his administration, and the ongoing scandals around his attorney general pick, Matt Gaetz.Donald Trump “is continuing to shovel steaming piles of nominee into his cabinet”, said Stephen Colbert on Tuesday’s Late Show. On Tuesday, Trump announced the pseudoscience advocate and former TV host Mehmet Oz as the administrator of Medicare and Medicaid. “OK so he’s still just picking people he sees on TV,” said Colbert. “Next up, the head of Amtrak goes to Thomas the Tank Engine
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Late-night hosts talk Donald Trump’s “White House Tinder” cabinet selection process and Republicans’ willingness to exploit loopholes to get their way.Jon Stewart returned to his Monday evening perch at The Daily Show to urge Democrats to act like Republicans and “exploit the loopholes” to thwart Donald Trump’s agenda.“Even those putting up resistance to Trump’s agenda don’t seem to understand who they’re dealing with,” said Stewart before a clip of Elizabeth Warren accusing the president-elect of breaking the law by failing to sign an ethics pledge before the deadline.“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Republicans are playing chess, and the Democrats are in the nurse’s office because they glued their balls to their thigh,” said Stewart
Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Francis Ford Coppola’s very horny vampire epic
This year marked the long-awaited return of the American film-making legend Francis Ford Coppola to the cinema, with Megalopolis: a $120m self-financed “fable” with a go-for-broke sensibility, about a time-defying architect trying to build the city of the future in the wake of his wife’s untimely death. Fans of its deranged overtures may do well to revisit Coppola’s other maximalist fable about a time-defying man grappling with his wife’s untimely death: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.It was lead actress Winona Ryder who first brought the project to Coppola – as an apology after she abruptly quit Coppola’s third Godfather film (to be infamously replaced by his daughter, Sofia). Coppola’s version of the gothic novel brings the bloodthirsty Count (a brilliant Gary Oldman) out of the shadows and into the forefront, reimagining the character as a tragic war hero, who – in renouncing God after the suicide of his wife, Elisabeta (Ryder) – is condemned to eternal life as a vampire. Years pass, and the shape-shifting Dracula discovers that the reincarnation of his wife, Mina (also Ryder), resides in 19th century London, where he eventually seduces her at the exhibition of a newfangled entertainment: the cinematograph
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