• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, December 5, 2024

Earlier this week, I wrote about an Apple Christmas commercial featuring a father who could only hear his daughter’s music via his iPods with adaptive hearing aids.

Called “Heartstrings,” the spot succeeded in humanizing technology.

By bizarre contrast, Jaguar’s “Copy Nothing,” a video released in mid-November, technologizes humans.

Serving as a coming attraction for the ailing British auto brand’s revolutionary move to all-electric cars by next year, it shows a group of diverse individuals arrayed like birds, sporting bright pink, blue and yellow costumes as plumage.

The cockeyed costumes were better fit for a Colors of Benneton ad back in 1991, except those ads looked cool.

I believe the creatives wanted to focus on the electric future, but the whole setup reminded me more of Rudi Gernreich in the 1960s inventing the topless bathing suit.

Of course, the hard-to-place video was immediately and mercilessly mocked on the web, mostly for being “woke,” but was also called “bonkers.”  (Still, it attracted more than 160 million views.)

Frankly, it seemed so disconnected from reality, in its own time warp, that it gave me “Sprockets” vibes: I refer to the early ‘90s “Saturday Night Live” sketches featuring comedian Mike Myers as “Dieter,” a disaffected West German artist driven to dance.

Jaguar’s creative director called the spot “Exuberant Modernism.”

Meanwhile, the ad’s uncoupling from anything remotely automotive was also tartly noted by Elon Musk on X when he posted “do they sell cars?”

The name of the campaign, “Copy Nothing,” is unfortunate, since it “borrows” wildly from some of Apple’s best ad work from 35 years ago or so.

That’s when advertising-wise, baby Apple was in the same position as the ailing, old Jaguar brand is right now, with no new physical product to show.

So Chiat/Day came up with a blazing placeholder campaign, “Think different,” that became brand-defining.

The creative, including scale-defying billboards, focused on black-and-white portraits of some of the great thinkers and visionaries throughout history, from Picasso to Einstein to Ted Turner. A voiceover in the TV spot explained, “Because while some might see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.”

By the following year, the intro of Apple's candy-colored iMacs made good on its ad promise.

Let’s not forget that the campaign also established the ungrammatical use of “different.”

And sure enough, as the “Copy Nothing” video unfolds, it flashes some staccato two-word phrases that decapitate adverbs in a similar Apple-onian way: “Live vivid” for instance.

Hell, by the time the spot gets to “break moulds” (British spelling) a woman with short yellow hair is shown wielding a yellow hammer.

We’ve seen this in advertising before, in Apple’s now lionized “1984” commercial featuring a running female athlete with short blonde hair who defies totalitarianism by throwing a hammer at Big Brother’s big screen.

Talk about revolutionary disruption!

But now there’s a postscript for the British brand making such a radical switch.

Jaguar Land Rover, the parent company, has been investing billions in its EV transition, according to the blog Which EV.

And after drawings of two new concept cars -- dubbed Type 00 -- were leaked into the social media sphere earlier this week, Jaguar revealed a four-wheeled living concept of the real thing.

Released during Art Basel’s Miami Art Week, and perhaps to honor Miami’s pastels, one of the models is dressed in “Miami Pink.” (Think Barbie, if you will.) There’s also one in opalescent "London Blue," the only reference to the EV’s roots.

Indeed, Jaguar is going big on its bet on the future. The concepts behind the concept cars got mixed responses from automotive buffs, some of whom are still fuming that by completely doing away with combustion-engine cars, Jaguar has thrown away its “heritage.”

Radical change is notoriously hard to accept. And such a transition inevitably includes growing pains.

Jaguar managing director Rawdon Glover said in an interview in the Financial Times that the campaign’s intended message of modernity had been lost in “a blaze of intolerance” on social media.

Now that some of the blanks are filled in, I understand why Jaguar went there. And the video sure did get attention.

Glover added,  “If we play in the same way that everybody else does, we’ll just get drowned out… We need to re-establish our brand and at a completely different price point.” (The new EVs will be significantly more expensive than the already upscale Jaguars were.)

“So we need to act differently,” Glover noted.

Agreed. And there it is again: Think different.