He dines at Manhattan’s most exclusive eateries and glides past security at nightclubs. He wears custom-made shirts and drives an $80,000 Jaguar XK.
But can he sell cars? Nico Bossi, a 27-year-old native of Rome, is one of New York’s beautiful people. He not only looks like a runway model, he is also a real-life walking advertisement for Jaguar, the British sports-car maker.
In Manhattan, Bossi and his silver ride show up at all the right places, such as Pastis and Soho House, hangouts in New York’s trendy meatpacking district. He is known to pull up at Milk and Honey, a Lower East Side lounge where patrons need reservations and a secret phone number to get in, and Double Seven, a dance club on West 14th Street.
Other good places to spot the XK are the uptown shopping area around Bergdorf Goodman and the Hamptons, on eastern Long Island.
Jaguar, a unit of Ford Motor Co., has given Bossi the sleek XK to use free, weaving it into his already fabulous lifestyle in hopes that by merely being seen in one, he will persuade friends, acquaintances and wannabes to buy a Jag.
Bossi has a West Coast counterpart, Reese Forbes, a 30-year-old skateboarder whose haunts include the Newsroom, a hot Los Angeles cafe-lounge; Lucques, a celebrity-studded restaurant in West Hollywood; and the Hotel Bel-Air.
In all, Jaguar says this year it plans to sprinkle five of its high-end cars with jet-setters in markets that could include Dallas, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver and Chicago. The company has not yet chosen a representative for the Denver area and has not determined precisely when it will, said Laura Pettitt, a spokeswoman for Brandman PR, which represents Jaguar.
Nonetheless, Jaguar is already launching other elements of its see-and-be-seen campaign in Colorado. With the nonprofit Arzu, it co-hosted an elite party in Aspen where invited guests could check out (and buy) the new Jaguars. Invited guests included Arizona Sen. John McCain, Ed Bradley of “60 Minutes,” actors Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, CNN pundit Paula Zahn, Playboy’s Christy Hefner and Chicago socialite Estelle Walgreen.
It is reality-based product placement, the eerie place where real life blurs seamlessly into advertising. Other car makers have tried it on a smaller scale: General Motors Corp. chauffeured VIPs around the Super Bowl earlier this year in Cadil lac Escalade SUVs.
The Jaguar campaign is more underground. It isn’t obvious to passers-by – nor even to casual acquaintances – that Bossi’s XK is part of an elaborate marketing come-on.
He isn’t paid beyond the free use of the car, nor is he reimbursed for parking or restaurant bills. (Jaguar insures the car under the same kind of policy it has for the fleets it lends out to automotive reviewers and other media.) To support the reality marketing effort, Jaguar is running traditional television commercials and print ads.
Bossi doesn’t appear in what the automaker calls its “Gorgeous” campaign, but in one spot, leggy women and dashing men (actors, not the real jet-setters) mingle at a soiree at a French chateau, while outside, the XK is barely visible.
“Gorgeous makes effort look effortless,” the ads say. “Gorgeous gets in everywhere.”
Staff writer Kristi Arellano contributed to this report.
