With the “Gorgeous” campaign for Jaguar, creatives at Euro RSCG Fuel, New York, are sending a straightforward message to consumers–Jaguar has gorgeous cars. The simple concept is brought to life in a :90 film on www.PreferGorgeous.com. The piece also ran in cinemas and on television in the U.S. in November. (Fuel is a division of Euro RSCG devoted to the Jaguar and Volvo accounts.)
“Gorgeous” not only promotes the overall brand, which includes the X-Type, S-Type and XJ models, but also features the 2007 XK, which will launch in early 2006. “Long ago [Jaguar] decided, ‘You know what, we need to get back to the rad, modern and sexy high-performance cars that we used to make,’ so when it arrived in the form of the XK, they were like, ‘This is the perfect car in which to sort of reintroduce the brand to the world,'” related executive creative director Jeff Kling.
IMAGE MAKERS
The film begins with a tight shot of a shiny rim and moves on to a shot of a woman lounging in a bikini and sunglasses. Then, a trim grey-haired man is shown removing his button-down shirt. Images of Jaguar cars continue to slowly appear as do shots of attractive people enjoying themselves in luxurious settings.
Actor Willem Dafoe provides the voiceover that slowly begins, “Gorgeous. Gorgeous. Gorgeous deserves your immediate attention.” As people are gathered around a large table at a party he continues, “Gorgeous makes effort look effortless.” Then as a beautiful woman rolls around in bed, “Gorgeous stays up late and still looks gorgeous.” The frolicking and poetry continue with lines like “Everyone cares what gorgeous says” and “Gorgeous gets in everywhere,” eventually closing with the lines, “Gorgeous trumps everything. Gorgeous is worth it.”
“As we were looking at the brand, we tried all kinds of different gambits and angles into it and we mentally tried a lot of things on and we realized that the more we dug, this word, this idea tends to hang around this brand,” Kling said. “And a lot of people when at a loss for words to describe these cars continually resort to gorgeous and it seems particular to this brand.”
There were two goals with this endeavor: to make the brand feel more modern and restore it to its luxury status, Kling pointed out. He said that people tend to talk about the brand in relation to models from previous decades like the ’60s and noted that years ago it was a preeminent aspiration brand for people. “There’s a lot of excitement, if you look at this car [the XK] and test drive it like we did. You can feel like they’ve got their act together and their communications needed to reflect that and needed get away from playing the luxury car category games of saying we have x amount of horsepower,” he related.
Director and photographer Michel Comte shot the images during a four-day shoot in Condecourt (near Paris) and St. Tropez, France. The fashion photographer was the right choice for this project not only because of his “keen eye and taste level,” said Kling, but also because he moves in the jet set, elegant and sexy world the film depicts.
“He has close personal relationships with a lot of people who move in these out-of-reach circles,” Kling noted. “So he just gets it and because of who he is and how established he is, he can make things happen that just do not otherwise happen, and those are intangibles. He doesn’t even have a production company.” For this piece, Grande Large, Paris, handled the production.
Editor Scott Gaillard of Outside Editorial, New York, cut the brand film. “It was basically trial and error, it was trying to find the scenes that were shot–some impromptu, some were set up and conceived before hand–that would best illustrate the copy points,” Gaillard shared of his approach. For him, the loose story was of a group of friends who had gathered for a weekend together that involved a party that lasted all night and perhaps a jaunt to the pool.
Gaillard noted that the process was one of the most collaborative of his career, which included working with agency staffers Kling, creative directors Hal Wolverton and Alicia Johnson, and freelance print and graphic designer Kristina Williams, as well as Outside Editorial’s graphic designer Jamie Lamond. “It’s one of the few times that having this many people intimately involved with the process made it much much better than it would have been had they not been,” Gaillard said.
Online banner, print and outdoor ads are driving traffic to the site, which also features a “Contributors” page. That destination holds commentary from people like fashion designer Zac Posen, who explains what gorgeous means to him, and Jaguar’s design director Ian Callum, who talks about the brand and its cars.
Additional credit at Euro RSCG Fuel goes to David Jones, global CEO; Ron Berger, CEO (New York and San Francisco); Michael Lee, executive creative director/integration; Joe Guyt, co-director of broadcast production; Cathy Pitegoff, co-director of broadcast business affairs; and Eve Bates and Stacy Edelstein, producers.
At Grand Large credit goes to Steven Horton, executive producer; Samantha Veyne, producer; and Philippe Piffeteau, DP.
Outside Editorial staffers who worked on the project include David Madden, assistant editor; Steve Mottershead, Flame artist; and Tricia Higgins, producer.
