Dead Ad Society

As you might have guessed I have been cleaning out my garage again. In yesterday's post I stumbled across a collection of cartoons my friend Jim and I had authored in the early 80's. Today I unearthed some dead Jaguar ads from the early 2000 oughts. 

These were done early in my very short tenure at Young & Rubicam in Irvine, where I had the unique opportunity to work with legendary art director, John Doyle, who, if he isn't in the Advertising Hall of Fame, surely needs to be.

In case you had ever doubted Jaguar's lack of marketing acumen, they had given us no money for any new photo shoots and we had to work with the stock photos they already had in their possession. They had no limitations on copy however, so I wrote copy for all these ads (and many more) hoping they'd see the value in running a campaign that exalted engineering achievements from a car company that had long rested on their fashion laurels.

As my friend and fellow blogger George Tannenbaum often points out, you need to give people, even very affluent people, a reason to buy an automobile especially when they're shelling out 6 digits for the key fob.  The folks at Porsche, Mercedes and BMW understand this. 

The genii at Jaguar did not.

As noted previously, these are dead ads. 

I read recently there was some kind of contest, where nostalgic ad veterans got to air their dead ads in the hopes of winning another trophy or trinket. BTW, all my old ad awards went in the trash bin yesterday along with some shrunken moth-eaten sweaters, house remodeling photo's and some old 2X4's that never got fashioned into anything useful.

Maybe it's just me, but dead ads are boring. How they died makes for a better story.

We had assembled in a conference room at PAG, the Premier Auto Group, that owned Ford, Mazda and Jaguar/Land Rover. These ads, and many more were pinned up on 6 foot high foam core boards. Very old school. Not more than 10 minutes into the presentation, I unveiled the first board and started reading the copy for one of the spreads seen above.

HEADLINE: The Courageous Floor Mat

BODY COPY: It is possible you've never pondered the brave existence of the floor mat. Precious few have. The exceptions are those who drive the all-new Jaguar XJ, featuring an innovative Self-Leveling Air Suspension. Designed to reduce wind drag at high speeds, the suspension actually lowers the body of the car, like an animal crouching closer to the ground, for maximum performance. Which makes the confident quiet ease of the floor mat, as it hurtles through space, only inches from the asphalt, that much more impressive.

Before I could finish reading the last line, I heard a booming voice from the front row. It was the CMO.

"Next."

I mistakenly thought he wanted me to read the next ad in the campaign.

"No, next campaign."

And that's how these ads and hundreds more like it, died.

What a glamorous business.