EDIT: “Nando’s South Africa takes these threats very seriously and will regrettably no longer flight the TV commercial.
“We feel strongly that this is the prudent step to take in a volatile climate and believe that no TV commercial is worth risking the safety of Nando’s staff and customers.”
So, just to confirm, Nando’s feels strongly that the right choice in this volatile environment is to can the ad, an environment presumably not perceived as volatile about two weeks ago. Riiiiight.
Is there a better way of selling friend chicken than with Robert Mugabe, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Pik Botha and Muammar Gaddaffi?
Clearly if you run Nando’s ad campaigns for them the answer is no. This is, admittedly, very well done and very amusing. But – and feel free to call me a humourless PC-brigade knobhead – it’s rather tempered by the fact that between them the men featured in this advert are responsible for killing millions of people.
Were I to Godwin myself in this – only the third paragraph of this post – I’d suggest that Nando’s is unlikely to feature Hitler pointing at a gas chamber and laughing in any of its ads for selling fried chicken. Which begs the question: how many deaths must you commit before you’re considered beyond the pale when it comes to selling fried chicken?
Was Pol Pot excluded because he was deemed ‘too murderous’? Or Papa Doc Duvalier ruled out due to the rapacious extent of his butchery? Heck, if people who killed millions are okayed, then what about mere mass murderers?
Just imagine Fred West, Denis Nilson, Peter Sutcliffe, Ian Huntley, Ian Brady and Harold Shipman having a party around a big table in the Nando’s UK-specific Christmas advert for fried chicken. Miming the throttling of their victims; giving gifts of spades to one another; pointing at bones and just laughing and laughing…
If that doesn’t say ‘have a very merry Christmas and eat some fried chicken’ I really don’t know what does.