F*ck me, it’s Clarkson swearing. Again

Marketing Unfiltered 38 - Smart Or F-ing Stupid?

AuthorAuthor

Danny Denhard & Harry Lang
July 18, 2025

📝 JULY 18th | EDITORS NOTE 📝

Greetings, Marketing Leaders ☀️!

Good Morning, leaders. Thanks for the great feedback on last week’s newsletter on the Future Of PR (the 9 top takeaways of this are below 👇).

Great news; we have a follow-up on the future of PR coming soon with another industry leader.

This week we have Harry returning on his funny take (of his neighbour) on Jeremy Clarkson’s latest ad, and how stupid/brave/smart their approach to advertising their beer, “Hawkstone” is.

Thanks for reading again this week and have a great weekend!
Danny Denhard - Let’s connect on LinkedIn

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HARRY APPRECIATED THE 🆕 & SMART AD FROM TEAM JEREMY CLARKSON

F*ck me, it’s Clarkson swearing. Again.

The potty mouthed broadcaster turned farmer has won before the battle’s started with his ‘designed to be banned’ beer ad. 

Another day, another example of the fame vs. quality division.

The more well-known you are, the less hard you have to try if you want to promote your wares.

Earlier this week, Jeremy Clarkson has banged the same drum he always does when he wants to lift awareness of his TV driving show/ farm show/ new pub/ lager – he looked down over his belly at the problem at hand, an incredulous look no doubt stretched across his ruddy face - then swore at it.

The new ‘ad’ for Hawkstone lager features Clarkson surrounded by local farmers singing a reprise of the Flower Duet from the opera Lakmé. If that means nothing to you, it’s the same sweeping harmony British Airways used in its 1989 advertising masterpiece.

It’s somewhat ironic that the same song now sits at such opposing ends of the advertising quality spectrum.

Smart Move

Of course, the Hawkstone ad was never designed to be seen in any ad break. Following the strategy perfected by Paddy Power and fuel injected by the whimsical powerlessness of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), it was created to never be aired.

Instead, it’s garnering millions of views on socials and has significant PR backing from the mainstream press. The Sun, Britain’s increasingly out of touch daily tabloid, gave it a big British thumbs up – which may or may not be related to Clarkson’s close friendship with Cotswolds neighbour (and News UK CEO) Rebekah Brooks.

Jeremy slams the ASA — aka the fun police on his beers ad being banned

For those not aware, there are tectonic plates that move faster than the ASA. They tend to ban adverts several months after they last aired, usually giving the protagonist brand an extra PR bump as a freebie. In this case, Hawkstone couldn’t be arsed to wait for their glacial ineptitude, so effectively declared it as ‘banned’ at launch, allowing Clarkson to go off on one of his famous hyperbolic (if factually divorced from the truth) rants in The Sun’s coverage:-

“It’s a cock-up, as usual,” said Clarkson. “…The fun police in their beige offices have decided that the public can’t be trusted to watch it. It’s been kicked off the telly, silenced on the radio, and barred from the cinema”.

None of which, of course, is true. But why should he let that get in the way of a good story? Or incremental beer sales? 

“He shouldn’t!” scream his legions of adoring (if cranially challenged) followers. 

“He mustn’t!” bellow Grand Tour mug owning, Sun reading simpletons in their droves.

“It’s a travesty of free speech – wokeism gone mad!” froths Nigel Farage as he glugs back his fourth complimentary Hawkstone of the morning.  

It’s a lager - not a bad one by all accounts - and Clarkson’s support for farmers is admirable, if self-serving (it can most definitely be both). But this is bottom rung marketing that only works when you have a hugely popular megaphone at the helm. If anyone else tried this kind of mildly offensive grandstanding they’d be toast, or worse – ignored entirely.

As it is, the choir adopted for the F-Bomb chorus makes the local farmers look less like admirable grafters who need our collective support against a rabidly city-centric government and more like co-opted minions, tricked into filming a TV ad under the pretence they were singing hymns at the Chadlington fete. I think one of the guys in the back row might even be blinking a cry for help in Morse Code…

Second Order Effects

There’s a secondary qualm to this debacle that directly affects us marketers. It’s a tough time to be a marketer, and every example of this pseudo controversial handmade bullshit will fuel a thousand needless conversations, in which CEOs will ask CMOs 'Why cant you do that'?

The stratospheric viral success of things like the Hawkstone ad will be forged into poisoned pills then force fed to marketers everywhere and trust me, it's a bitter pill to swallow.

In a previous role, I had to handle a Musk obsessed founder who repeatedly challenged me to mimic Tesla's social success and Christ, biting my true feelings back should've earned me a Sainthood.

Now, I have to come clean lest I be accused of unnecessary bias. I have previous form when it comes to Mr. Clarkson. Around fifteen years ago, I disagreed with one of his now infamous ‘Result’s Day’ Tweets, in which he pointed out how his poor A Level results hadn’t hindered his collection of sports cars. When I suggested that education was actually quite a good thing, and not everybody could expect to become a media superstar, he replied succinctly:-

“You, sir, are a moron”.

Which, as anyone who knows me will tell you, is fair. What wasn’t fair was the pile on I received from over half of his 7 million followers, some of whom went pretty dark pretty quickly in their poorly spelt name calling efforts. 

Clarksons Powerful Following

The point is, Clarkson has an army of loyal disciples that could populate Scotland. They love his devil may care attitude, they worship his no nonsense bravado and they idolise the way he sticks it to The Man (‘The Man’ seemingly anyone who hinders his commercial or televisual endeavours).    

Around this neck of the Cotswolds, we’re surrounded by Clarkson’s burgeoning empire. There’s a triangle of enterprise starting with his Diddly Squat farm, pivoting to Hawkstone Brewery in Bourton on the Water and culminating with his pub, The Farmer’s Dog, just off the A40 between Swinbrook and Minster Lovell. They’re great businesses, attracting swathes of visitors from across the country and employing what I imagine to be hundreds of local people in an area known more for second homeowners than young people’s career prospects. 

As such, I can only admire the scope and success of his endeavours. Of course I’m envious – I mean, who wouldn’t love to own a thriving brewery, a pub and a farm in this area of outstanding natural beauty? But I can still dislike his goading efforts to court cheap seats controversy with this latest ad. 

It’s the kind of tittering bullshit that should only appeal to twelve year old schoolboys – and in that respect, as an alcohol ad, it really should be banned.    

» Harry Lang is a CMO and the founder of Brand Architects, a strategic marketing and brand consultancy. He’s co-curator of the weekly Marketing Unfiltered Newsletter and author of the 5 Star rated marketing guidebook ‘Brands, Bandwagons & Bullshit’. If you’re an irate Clarkson fan, you can find him on LinkedIn.

    » Connect with Harry on LinkedIn or buy his book as a gift

⚽️ Did you see this great ad this week?

9 Takeaways From Last Week’s MU Article

The 9 takeaways from my interview with Rick at Smoking Gun MU37 - What’s the future of PR.

  1. AI Cons: LLMs are trained on broad sources, and the data often includes misleading information and is trained on synthetic data. Be mindful… and know where you could leverage…

  2. AI Pros: Integration of advanced AI for data analysis, creative testing, and crisis simulation

  3. Get Closer: Ever more personalised messaging, real-time experiences, and communications at scale

  4. Storytell: Audiences will increasingly reward brands that demonstrate genuine transparency, values alignment, and authentic storytelling

  5. Be Human First: More real-life/human interest case studies to help brands stay HUMAN first

  6. Go On The EGC Offence: Rise of employee-generated content (EGC)

  7. Be There: there will be continued growth of social commerce and creator-driven content - be there with them

  8. Internal Comms: Internal communications is critical, but often overlooked, PR channel. You need to own internal comms as a leader

  9. Micro & Macro: on niche micro-influencers and B2B influencer (KOLs) strategies to break out of your bubble

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