David Shapshak
Satire – apart, of course, from chicken – is Nando’s speciality. Its advertising has always piggy-backed on current issues and ridiculed or satirised them. Humour, you see, is their secret ingredient. It has arguably sold them more chickens than their famous Portuguese sauces.
Remember the just-recognisable grey- haired global leader with a predilection for young women being held back by his bodyguards when United States President Bill Clinton was in town? Or the Spice Grills (dancing chickens on a billboard) when those toneless idiots in short dresses pretended to the world they could sing? Or the American tourist who hands his camera to a skebenga to take a picture?
Nando’s has a reputation for sterling media campaigns based very accurately on the topics dominating headlines and dinner-table conversations.
So it’s no surprise they’ve used the recent launch of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 98, as their latest gimmick. (Web surfers will remember their first hilarious “rip- off” of the ubiquitous Netscape website.) But, a website is a website is a website. What makes this one any different?
It’s humorous theft of Microsoft’s widespread icons and logos and the software giant’s active desktop idea.
As the site downloads, the browser flashes a blue, cloud-filled sky la Microsoft’s start-up screen, emblazoned with “Nando’s 98” in the same typeface. Then the site itself appears, like a computer’s desktop, with a line of icons down the left side of the screen, wallpaper behind it. The clickable icons are an innovative alternative to HTML links (the “click here to see XYZ” with a blue line underneath).
It has all the other features of Win98, disguising the usual goodies all website have: who Nando’s is and its corporate history (the Nando’s Explorer), an online shopping facility for clothes only (Peri-Peri warehouse) and the very funny PNN (Peri-Peri news network – a very realistic rip-off of CNN Interactive, the news giant’s website). The stories are all fictional and use big names and outlandish turn son current events – “Allegations that Max the gorilla was involved in a recent vigilante attack on the house of a suspected drug lord have been strongly denied by zoo officials” – and are much more readable than the drivel on most websites.
And of course there are the over- friendly help functions. All of the links are done in Windows format with a bit of a twist: the site also has a taskbar (the grey bar along the bottom of Windows screens) which has duplicates of the links and which you use to navigate.
It’s designed by those multimedia wizards VWV Interactive, who seem to have their hand in all the latest online products.
As websites go, it’s a corporate presence. But filled with a bit of saucy verve it’s more amusing, innovative and spicier than the usual lot.