Nando’s new TV advert is throwing some vicious shade, with a burn so bad even we felt it. The ad pokes fun at the look of many adverts in South Africa these days, and takes a clear shot at recent campaigns from Absa and Absolut Vodka. “It’s all looking the same,” says Isithembiso actor Hamilton Dlamini in the advert.
The ad makes fun of the common tropes of recent South African ads, including burning TVs, neon, painted faces and hyenas – but with locals getting increasingly irritated as weird-looking people on thrones and coloured smoke bombs interfere with their actual African lives.
“There’s so much more to being South African than one narrow vignette and we thought it would be fun to point out some of the absurdities of it all,” says Doug Place, Nando’s chief marketing officer.
“We love the aesthetic of African creativity,” he says. “African-ness is layered, it doesn’t always have to look so derelict, so serious, so over the top, and all the same.”
Absa’s recent campaign is clearly derided in the new Nando’s ad, which opens with two models kissing a bottle of “detergent” marked with the logo “African-nasti” – which looks a lot like Absa’s new made-up word “Africanacity”.
But when asked by Business Insider which brands were referenced in the ad, Nando’s responded: “We’ve just used generic references. Anyone could have designed the logo on the bottle that, but come to think of it we have seen something similar, but not for a bank.”
Source: Business Insider
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