Is this the marketing version of the reality show? It is definitely an example of how people arent always as rich as they seem, although it sounds pretty good to be Nico Bossi. Why dont my parents own a cruise ship line?

Jaguar Tries a Living Product Placement

By GINA CHON

June 29, 2006

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, Mr. 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 Mr. 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.

...

The campaign is "about people seeing Nico and the car and wanting to be part of that," says Alicia Johnson, creative director for the Jaguar account at the New York office of Havas SA's Euro RSCG Worldwide. The success of the campaign "is how many people touch and see the car."

That Mr. Bossi isn't getting paid lends the campaign authenticity, Ms. Johnson adds -- although before being named Gorgeous, Mr. Bossi wasn't driving anything. In real life he runs a marketing agency called LuxWell Media Group, of which he is the only full-time employee. Before his XK came along, he mostly took cabs or car services around Manhattan. When he was growing up in Rome, his father owned a Jaguar. But when he was in high school, his parents, owners of a cruise line, bought him a BMW M3.