Jaguar and Volvo’s ads are both terrible

Both Jaguar and Volvo released online marketing campaigns that went extremely viral this week. One was a huge success and one was a legendary ad bust. But they’re both absolutely terrible, for very different reasons.

Jaguar offered a hideous future shock of an ad that featured a cast of multicultural unisex models wearing bright, horrifying, ugly outfits, wielding paintbrushes and ball-peen hammers. In a font that may have looked futuristic around the release date of the original Logan’s Run, Jaguar encouraged its fleeting consumers to “create exuberant” and “live vivid,” among other things, but never actually encouraged them to drive or purchase a car. In fact, a car doesn’t even appear in the ad.

Jag clearly whiffed the zeitgeist by a mile with this campaign. We may or may not be “post-woke,” but no one asked for this pandering. The company sold fewer than 1,000 units in the United States last year — and it’s not because they failed to reach their target market of trans men wearing pink dresses while smashing things. Maybe it would appeal to residents of the Capitol in The Hunger Games, but not to anyone else.

I’ve been covering the auto industry for a long time, and I have a semi-clear memory of attending a deluxe celebration for Jaguar/Land Rover’s fiftieth anniversary at the Paris Motor Show, featuring a dramatic appearance by Daniel Craig to tie in with the premiere of Skyfall. That was modern Jaguar’s peak, when lads with money to burn still roamed the Earth. Their current ad aims to reach who still remains after the cultural apocalypse, a final, desperate, multi-million-dollar squeal from a possibly dying brand, featuring bad Gen-Z copies of Grace Jones.

On the other end of the cultural spectrum, you have Volvo, a company that’s doing quite well and is still making cars that people actually want to buy. Recently they put out a nearly four-minute-long ad, shot by the cinematographer of Interstellar and Oppenheimer. I first saw this ad at a Volvo launch in southern California this week and instantly proclaimed it “horseshit.” Apparently, I was alone in my opinion, because the internet went berserk for this thing. But I stand firm.

In this ad, you see a very Euro man and woman in a Scandinavian-designed apartment. They have learned they are pregnant — and the man is telling his mother over the phone that he’s scared. We then see the child’s entire life flash before us, told in short bursts, including melodramatic fights with her parents, the heartbreak of young love and what appears to be a pungent semi-career of partying hard in Ibiza.

Finally, nearly three minutes into the mini-movie, we see the pregnant mother crossing the street with some groceries. Some gal who we haven’t yet seen is noodling down the street in her Volvo. As the mother enters the crosswalk, the Volvo’s extraordinary AI safety features engage, braking just in time to avoid hitting the mother, thereby preserving the unborn child’s future of rolling on molly while dancing to a Roger Sanchez set live at Pacha.

We see the words: “Sometimes the moments that never happen matter the most.”

How profound!

This ad is ridiculous and manipulative and contains all the elements of modern storytelling I despise the most: voiceover, dark, grainy lighting and, most of all, a non-linear narrative. It does highlight Volvo’s longtime signature selling point: top-of-the-market safety features. But it does so in the most pretentious way possible — and hides the actual car until the end of the movie.

People loved this mini-movie, but to the conservatives who think this is an “anti-woke” model: this family only has one kid and they live in Europe. And also, the car is electric. As for the non-ideological people who are responding to the excess sentiment, well, there’s no accounting for taste. I guess we all want to feel safe.

Personally, I prefer ads that say, one way or another, “this car goes fast” or “this car is zero-carbon” or “this car can haul a small boat up a hill.” My ideal car, even though I don’t own a boat and never will, would exhibit all three qualities. I don’t need to “live vivid.” I just want to have a little bit of fun while also getting home alive. And I’m perfectly willing to experience all that in linear time, and in natural light.