Jaguar’s been testing the “no such thing as bad publicity” maxim

Create exuberant. Live vivid. Delete ordinary. Break molds. Copy nothing. 

While that list of imperatives wouldn’t look out of place as the set of hashtags at the bottom of your least favorite LinkedInfluencer’s Monday Motivation post today, they’re actually lifted from Jaguar’s 30-second ad that dropped last week. 

Old cat, new tricks

The colorful-yet-carless clip, heavily maligned as a disasterclass in many corners of the internet and lightly praised in a few others, marked a major tone shift for the British carmaker, as the luxury brand looks to reinvent itself in the age of EVs. The day after it kicked off its “Copy Nothing” campaign with the video ad, Jaguar (JaGUar, after the rebrand) teased a new car ahead of its reveal in Miami on December 2, with the company having already announced a halt on all new car sales until 2026, when it’ll bring three new electric models to market. 

Some of the ad’s biggest apologists have argued that the “Copy Nothing” campaign has already achieved what must have been one of the biggest goals during the in-house brainstorms behind the rebrand: get people talking about the bold new modern era for the 90-year-old company. To be fair, the data shows they might have a point, too, with Google search interest in “jaguar cars” hitting a five-year peak in the week around the campaign’s launch.

As Jaguar MD Rawdon Glover put it in an interview with the Financial Times: “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.” In that regard, at least, mission accomplished?