Ferial Haffajee
While sitting around talking advertising with the team responsible for the side-splittingly funny Nando’s campaign, one thing is striking. They’re all spring chickens.
The twentysomething team is responsible for multimedia campaigns that have won Nando’s peer approval, solid sales growth for the 10-year-old chicken chain and the trust of Amory Gordon, Nando’s national marketing manager.
There’s a strong bond between the company and the agency. “It’s a fun, irreverent brand personality,” says account manager Nicholas Bloom. There’s nothing like carte blanche to get the creative juices flowing and the team attests to eating, sleeping and thinking Nando’s. Bloom’s former housemate features in a television ad as the frizzy-haired madcap who gets his tongue caught in the freezer after eating Nando’s Hot chicken. Kevin Watkins, the creative group head, says he enjoys walking into a franchise and watching customers chuckle.
With a small budget, the team says their advertising must entertain and mustn’t be of the instantly-reach-for-your-remote-control-to-flip-channels variety. They don’t have the luxury of buying tons of media space, so their advertising must be memorable.
It relies on being spread by the “Hey, did you check the latest Nando’s ad on TV?” grapevine. “Our marketing budget is a lot smaller than that of many competitors. We need to spend less on production and more on media. We need to use tactical advertising to our advantage,” says Gordon.
Tactical advertising means they use news to amplify their messages. A soccer match, the Olympics, jailbreaks, lousy matric results and the foibles of politicians all provide fodder for Bloom and company. Politicians (and cricket commentators) will say guileless things like “I’ll eat my hat.”
That’s what Gauteng’s education honcho Mary Metcalfe said she would do if last year’s matric results proved more disastrous than the previous year’s. They were. So the Nando’s team quickly penned a print campaign offering Metcalfe some Nando’s sauce to go with her hat and their PR company got shock-jock Mark Gillman of 5FM to pose as a milliner offering her a choice of hats to go with her sauce. It made for funny radio and free publicity for Nando’s.
The Hunt Lascaris copywriters use lots of puns (Freedom of Peach; Simply the Breast; Something on the Slaai (salad dressing) and a promotion offering five grilled chickens called the Spice Grills).
It is cheeky no-holds-barred and no-sacred-cows advertising that has taken the mickey out of politicians and every sensitive community from Rastas to soccerites and gays. Its tail-gunner ad is infamous. The everyday South African couple, Norman and Joan, meet their gay neighbours for dinner at Nando’s. Norman says innocently to one of the couple: “I believe you’re a tail-gunner. I’m a military man myself.”
The latest television ad – if it gets a thumbs-up from the company – is even more risqu,. It starts off all “olde world” with a deep male voice-over promising that we will finally know the secret of how Nando’s chickens are made. In the next scene the screen is sent aflutter with a couple of bonking chickens.
Not only do they risk upsetting the chicken-protection crowd, but the moral majority might be irked as well.
The flip-side of carte blanche is being given enough rope to hang yourself with. Sometimes the complaints from customers keep Gordon’s and Bloom’s phones ringing. A recent radio spot on the jailbreaks which “featured” jailed Eugene de Kock and Willem Ratte saw the former’s aunt and the latter’s wife both complain to Nando’s.
“We never try to be judgmental, we’re just commenting on people’s lives. We are not malicious and we’re not going out to harm anybody because everyone’s a customer or potential customer,” says Gordon.
But like her chickens, Gordon is not afraid of a grilling and for her, the test of successful advertising is the impact on the bottom line. “Advertising must sell a product and we see a definite impact during promotions.”