"They say absolute power corrupts," a shadowy Mark Strong leers, "What's wrong with that?" Strong's 8-second YouTube clip has earned the British actor, and more importantly the Jaguar brand responsible for this ad teaser, over 36,000 YouTube hits as of this writing. The Strong clip is just a sliver of the 60-second ad entitled "Rendezvous," a mini "blockbuster" Jaguar intends to unleash on 2014 Super Bowl viewers. The ad features not one but three British actors noted for their villainous roles, Strong, Sir Ben Kingsley, and Tom Hiddleston. They are all part of Jaguar's new "Good to be Bad" campaign that will trail the Super Bowl spot with sensational events, a Good to be Bad blog, and more.
Jaguar branding has always tried to allure its demographic with a bit of the jungle, for instance its 2011 video "Jaguar at Play" started three cars off in a jungle setting. From there, the cars "playfully" race through urban, old-world streets underscored by the speedy, blood-piquing rhythm of jungle drums.
From its inception, the name Jaguar was intended to convey attributes like "powerful" and "agile," words you will hear in many of its ads. The Jaguar brand is also pretty consistent with the idea that a Jag is a "sexy beast," which makes Kingsley, with his 2000 film of that title, an apt choice for the "Rendezvous" spot. But the "corruption" piece is new with this campaign.
The creative team behind "Rendezvous" feels that America is ready. According to Adweek's David Griner, the three agencies involved in this campaign (Jaguar's own Mindshare and Spark 44, plus Gawker, an American player in the blog and digital ad world) concluded that:
"Pop culture has tilted in recent years not just toward the anti-hero, but all the way to rooting for criminal masterminds." In Griner's article, James Del, executive director at Gawker's ad division, explained the phenomenon as a new element of complexity brought on by shows such as The Wire, Breaking Bad, and the Sopranos.
The element of complexity serves Jaguar well, a luxury vehicle going for a primal appeal. But on the contemporary value of "bad," Rendezvous appears to be going less for gritty realism than stylized wickedness, a tradition well honed by the ever-seductive vampire anti-hero or the stylized nemesis of a superhero (such as Strong's Green Lantern supervillain, Sinestro). These are bad guys only because human frailty frustrates them so. And they make us squirm by echoing our own inner voices: "You don't measure up, mere mortal."
Each "Rendezvous" teaser features one of the three villain-actors, but at close to a quarter million hits, Tom Hiddleston's 11-second clip towers over the other two in Youtube popularity. Hiddleston burst into American pop culture as Thor's shape-shifting half-brother Loki, most recently in "Thor: The Dark World." With his nagging envy and his mercurial loyalties, Hiddleston's Loki is certainly fraught with complexity. But judging from Hiddleston's fan comments this type of character is adorable-bad or delicious-bad (in the vein of Hiddleston's vampire role with Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive). Though hardly signaling a cultural shift, this type of bad comes from a longstanding filmic tradition that could serve Jaguar very well.
It will be interesting to see if Hiddleston and fellow British bad boys hit a sweet spot with the American imagination on Super Bowl Sunday. The ad mavens in charge of the Good to be Bad campaign are waiting too. Public sentiment, Del says, will determine the length of the Good to be Bad campaign. It may also determine the trajectory of the Jaguar brand and its newcomer, the F-Type Coupe, whether it becomes a cult icon or follows the path of a bad sales curve.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
