After Trump won the election, Justine Bateman tweeted "Decompressing from walking on eggshells for the past four years."
Decompressing from walking on eggshells for the past four years.
— Justine Bateman (@JustineBateman) November 8, 2024
As if the world just let out a big collective sigh, having to hide their likes, control their comments and bite their tongue for four years for fear of the opinion police. The opinion police who would begin by blocking you, and in many cases try to cut you out of the industry completely.
Then came the Jaguar ad. The advertising industry went wild tearing down a Jaguar ad with disdain in the comments about the ad being "gender-bending woke LGBTQ" with the fervor of the strictest conservatives you might find, and I find myself just as perplexed now as I was when the ad industry adored "gender-bending woke LGBTQ" ads and installed special LGBTQ+ ambassadors at every agency. The industry was so sold on gender-bending as a quick fix for garnering new awards that questioning it would get you written up in Shots for being a "bad feminist", that is, the kind that centers women. I know, it's fascinating that there actually is any other kind.
I'm partially confused because there is no gender-bending actually going on in this advert. There are androgynous models, like dancer Anna Engerström, and there is Rick Owens bought on TEMU style fashion in the latest Pantone palette. All women are in skirts and all men are in pants, albeit silly looking versions. Models walk around looking model-ly, in a pink desert landscape, teasing a new Jaguar look which will include a new logo and a new car. It's very "high fashion" in a way that isn't revolutionary in advertising at all. In fact my immediate thought was that it looked like a blend of 80s Benetton ads and 1960s Smirnoff ads.
The backlash was so catty and loud, it seemed to me this was a big exhale from walking on eggshells in the creative industry too. It takes a long time to create a new design, a brand campaign, and launch it. This ad is like a disco-album released two weeks after Disco Demolition Night in 1979. So hopelessly passé with it's multicolored group of fashionistas.
Now everyone is mocking it, including small content agencies, and brands on social media.
@wearetribera Paste everything. @Jaguar #jaguar #jaguarrebrand #agencylife #advertising #birminghamagency #marketingagency #officelife ♬ original sound - Tribera
Even the Guardian, the "wokest" of all papers, hated this rebrand, calling it a tired mess.
...two weeks post a Donald Trump election victory, and amid the undeniable sense that there has been a vibe-shift on the era of woke capitalism that has perplexed and delighted consumers for the past few years, in distinctly unequal measure.
The designer of the logo noted the "post Trump" correlation in a hilariously well-timed quip on X.
in our defense, when we were doing the jaguar rebrand, we thought for sure kamala was going to be elected.
— ben (@benhylak) November 20, 2024
People were quick to point out that "copy nothing" still copied something,
Australian advertising legend Ron Mather weighed in with a suggestion the creators leave advertising all together in Campaign Brief.
How did it all come to this?
It starts with activism, but it really kicks off with awards. Ad agencies and creatives need awards as a way of proving that they know what they are doing. Award shows need new categories to fleece more money out of the industry, so they invent new awards to 'encourage' certain types of work - and these new award categories are headed up by the activists. For example, the "glass lion" recognises creative work that addresses inequality and prejudice. The Channel 4 Diversity In Advertising Award offers an annual £1 million airtime prize which is a tempting prize for a smaller brand, but it is still big brands like Starbucks and E45 body lotion who win. Once awards have been established, agencies can begin pro-bono work for causes that clearly tick those boxes, like Grey did with Gay Times.
And this is where it gets really interesting, advertising agencies and brands have been in bed with publications and media for a long time. A decade plus ago Buzzfeed fleeced agencies to make "top ten lists" that nobody looked at, as a way to support the fledging publication, they toured agencies to explain what a great idea this was and how it was just a tiny crumble of media budget anyway. This gave the media a bit of editorial power on creative - and that's where the trouble began for Jaguar.
Santino Pietrosanti from Jaguar, spoke at the Attitude Awards 2024. The award was also sponsored by Jaguar.
Attitude is the UK and Europe's biggest-selling LGBTQ magazine. It's no coincidence that Virgin Atlantic is the other big sponsor - remember their ads and new gender non-conforming uniforms?
Darren Styles bought Attitude in 2016, and discussed coming out as gay with Bentley’s BeProud LGBTQ network. Yep, every workplace has a rainbow colored network now, which means that every brand has one, and every ad agency too. Bentley is as unexpected as Jaguar, which is to say not at all. If you wander Linkedin you'll find hundreds of people that sell consulting services specifically on how to make a workplace more inclusive to LGBTQ+MAP, though they don't say the last part of the letter chain out loud. A few years ago you could barely open a Campaign without seeing some famous ad personality claim a new identity as gay, queer or bisexual - even those who were happily married in a heterosexual marriage for decades came out because they couldn't be left behind in the boring bin of straight people.
By 2022 all things not rainbow colored was old scruff and Jaguar happily declared to PR week that the brand has now swapped "reach" for "the right audience".
In some ways it makes sense, who can afford a really expensive fashionable Jaguar? Someone who works at a high paying job in art, fashion or creative fields who probably isn't spending it on kids. There are a lot of gay men in such positions.
Jaguar buddying up with Attitude magazine and creating ads specifically for their readership even won them accolades as Kantar and Marketingweek announced this ‘Live Loud’ printad ranked among the top UK ads of all time. See how this begins to feed into itself when the magazine and brand pay the market researcher to see how well an ad did in their magazine...?
Attitude Magazine also named Dylan Mulvaney "woman of the year" - there are no coincidences here. Yes, the Dylan who sunk the Bud Light brand.
On December 2nd, Jaguar will be showcasing their new EV which nobody can buy until 2026, at the Miami Art Fest. A blue and a pink Jaguar will be fully revealed in a pink showroom. My my, for a rainbow gender-bendy concept car they sure like traditional masculine/feminine coded colors.
The pushback is partly because this concept is tired, the design is ugly, and none of it is really new or mould-breaking at all. The pushback is precisely because this is the mould we've been forced into for over a decade in advertising, and we're fed up with it.
