Nando’s is not just about chicken. It’s never been just about chicken. It’s about pride, passion, courage, integrity and most of all, family…
Nando’s is famous for its Portuguese flame-grilled, butterfly-cut chicken, which is marinated for 24-hours before being basted and cooked in Nando’s famous PERi-PERi sauce!
We all know the best things in life are FREE, so rest assured that our chicken is Hormone FREE, Steroid FREE, Cage FREE, Artificial colour FREE, Freezer FREE, Artificial flavour FREE, Excess fat FREE, Fryer FREE & Added MSG FREE.
Uh-huh. Death FREE, Pain FREE & Suffering FREE too I expect. And Nando’s supplier is… Bartter-Steggles? Inghams? Chickadee? Golden Cockerel…?
In any case…
OMG. Pole-dancing MILFs. Nando-fix gum. WTF.
The woman what appeared in the Nando-fix ad — remember her? — is now appearing in a new TV ad campaign for some other product or service, the name of which I have now inconveniently forgotten. Point being, the Nando’s ad (Nando’s — nee ‘Chickenland’ — is a South African-based restaurant chain which specialises in selling meats derived from chickens and covered in sauce) was criticised partly on the basis that it was sexy, partly because it devalued family values. The new, very chaste ad featuring the not-so-old stripper/model/actor, on the other hand, is entirely wholesome, and ends with her kissing her pretend children outside pretend skool gates.
Order has been restored.
Cold shoulder for aliens
Kelly Burke, Consumer Affairs Reporter
The Sydney Morning Herald
June 27, 2007
…Defending multiple complaints against its ad, another fast-food chain successfully argued the level of nudity used “was essential to ensuring authenticity”. The ad shows a topless pole-dancing mother using fictitious “Nando-fix” skin patches and gum to control her craving for Nando’s chicken.
“The concept is to show somebody who, for professional reasons, can’t wear the Nando-fix patch,” the company reasoned, disputing the ad was degrading to women.
Pole dancing had become mainstream, Nando’s argued, citing the example of Martha, a character in Home and Away, who works as a pole dancer.
[Jodi Gordon, the actor what played the role of ‘Martha Jane Mackenzie Holden (née Stewart)’ aka ‘Martha the pole dancer’ in Home And Away, got into heap ’em big trouble recently for paying for a lap dance. Or so says Uncle Rupert’s The Sun newspaper anyways: Soap star’s stripper scandal, Cara Lee, July 6, 2009.]
The board of the Advertising Standards Bureau agreed, ruling that pole dancing was “… a popular form of exercise” and “was not incompatible with family values”. The ad “depicted a strong in-control woman who went about her work in a professional manner”, because it showed her travelling to work wearing a suit, the board concluded, while the ad had not broken any rules regarding permissible levels of nudity.
See also : Advertising Standards Bureau ‘Case Report’, June 12, 2007 [PDF] | Australian Chicken Meat Federation Inc. | Consolidated / Carol Adams : ‘The Sexual Politics of Meat’ (June 6, 2009).
You can imagine the delight of the culinary-adventurous Portuguese mama’s [sic], who were already in heaven with their fresh vegetable gardens and the abundance of wild meat, when they discovered the secret powers of PERi-PERi and it’s effects on their cooking. PERi-PERi added flavour and fire to all their food making them feel alive. The women were also delighted with the effect that PERi-PERi had on the libidos of their men and it was no wonder that they were constantly smiling. The settlers were amazed that something so small could be so satisfying.
[Hurr hurr.]
Bonus!
Asylum seekers’ plight used to peddle chickens
Peter Gotting
The Age
July 29, 2002In a campaign designed to create controversy, fast-food chain Nando’s is using the sensitive issue of asylum seekers in its latest advertisements.
In a radio commercial to be launched today, Nando’s advertises that detainees at Woomera detention centre have “decided to unsew their lips after hearing the news that with every Nando’s quarter chicken combo, Nando’s are giving away an extra quarter chicken free”.
Nando’s said the campaign, which had a limited budget, was deliberately designed to attract media attention. It also includes print and in-store ads.
“We know there’s a section of our audience that’s going to be uncomfortable,” said Nando’s national marketing manager Carlos Antonius. “But we want to evoke response.
“We do not wish to offend anyone, and least of all the detainees, but we challenge the public to debate the issue.”
The fast food chain’s advertising has caused controversy before. A campaign which featured different coloured chickens and the line “We’re all the same on the inside, Pauline”, had some people throwing stones at its stores, Mr Antonius said.
The Advertising Federation of Australia says the campaign breaches the industry’s voluntary code of ethics, but the agency concerned, Melbourne’s Sphere Advertising, is not a member.
“Advertising needs to be bold, innovative and cheeky to cut through to consumers,” federation chairman Matthew Melhuish said. “However, it also needs to gauge the temperature of consumers about sensitive community issues. To use the refugee issue is appalling and it’s nothing more than a cheap shot.”
Controversy is regularly used by small advertisers to attract attention. One shoe company, which continues to create controversial ads, has said the publicity is worth millions in brand awareness and sales.
Bonus Naomi!
Tabloid queen a hauteur property
Amanda Meade
The Australian
August 2, 2006
NAOMI Robson doesn’t do many interviews. Give them or conduct them, that is.
On the eve of her 10-year anniversary as host of Channel 7’s Today Tonight in Melbourne, we wanted to talk to her about being one of the most watched, most successful women on television. She became the host of Today Tonight in Melbourne in 1997, then her audience expanded when she became the program’s Sydney host in 2001 and the Brisbane host in 2003.
She commands an audience of more than one million people across the three capital cities alone, five nights a week.
But Robson declined to be interviewed by Media and we gather it has nothing to do with us. High-profile TV hosts such as Tracy Grimshaw or Seven’s Melissa Doyle are often featured on the covers of women’s magazines and their life stories are well known. Not so Robson who, apart from a few juicy scandals involving foul language and a criminal boyfriend [Tony Mokbel’s Wig], remains an enigma.
According to publicity sources, Seven has always been pretty reluctant to expose Robson to scrutiny. She does not have the skills to conduct on-screen interviews, having little, if any, experience as a reporter.
“They tried to get her to do interviews,” a former Seven publicist tells Media. “But her sincerity factor was very low and she couldn’t follow up questions.”
Off air, the network feels she is too removed from her battler audience to risk exposure. (One example: when asked to name what she doesn’t leave home without, Robson nominated her diamond necklace).
The director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Graeme Turner, who wrote Ending the Affair: The Decline of Television Current Affairs in Australia, says Robson came from nowhere and her appeal is difficult to fathom. But he sums it up as “a matron in Gucci”.
“It’s often said the most successful presenter is the one you want to have a beer with,” he tells Media. “You would want to have a beer with Tracy (Grimshaw) before you want to have a beer with Naomi, but there’s this cold, waspish, punishment-oriented, dominatrix in Robson that fits with the tabloid audience. They want to see these people (on the program) caned. And yet because she is relatively stylish and good-looking she doesn’t come across as a harridan. There is a bit of matron in there.”
Seven’s director of news and public affairs, Peter [hic] Meakin, says Robson has done quite a few interviews, but we could find only light and fluffy articles in women’s magazines and a few Melbourne newspapers. Where Robson is concerned, even the innocuous day-in-the-life-of pieces can be disastrous. This one from 2001: “6.30am. Still in her pyjamas, she has a quick flick through the morning papers. ‘I have to know what’s going on. We (with executive producer Neil Mooney and producer Steve Carey) have a meeting in the morning to talk about any ideas we’ve got for stories.’ She has a quick shower and changes into her gym gear.”
Gee, it must have been a very quick flick because by 7.30am she is at Toorak Personal Training Centre for her thrice-weekly gym session. “I find leg work to be the hardest, so I go to the gym to do that,” she says. “On the days I’m not at the gym, I’ll get on the treadmill and walk at home.”
The diminutive Robson’s obsession with her appearance is a trait that has not endeared her to her colleagues. That she is not well liked is evidenced by the leaking of not one but two highly damaging tapes of her in the TT studio. In one she swears nine times in 15 seconds. “They fing drop it in at the last minute, you should be able to read every fing word, every comma,” she says. In the other, she calls the TT audience stupid and laughs at fat people while touching up her make-up. But the worst scandal hit in April when it was alleged she had a relationship with a cocaine-dealing Melbourne con man turned police informant.
But Robson has survived all the scandals, perhaps partly because the Melbourne media is so friendly to her and she is ahead of her game. Turner says TT has beaten A Current Affair so soundly partly because Channel 9 has been so suicidal about the show’s direction. “Today Tonight mainly picked up viewers that ACA has shed,” Turner says.
“I think what Robson does every time she performs is indicate a particular trashy, tabloid aesthetic, and she does that very well. If you see her as part of the overall look of the show, there is something about the visual style of the show that makes it look contemporary and more lively than ACA. The way she dresses and her cold, brittle image is part of that. If she was more warm and human there would be less of a distance between her and Tracy.”
A former Seven publicist tells Media Robson is “totally self-obsessed”, even while she is working, and he couldn’t send her out to talk to the media because she “talks about her Gucci sunglasses, her personal trainer and her BMW” without a thought for how she may be perceived. She will sit in the studio and tell people how many stomach crunches she did that morning. Unlike your Ray Martins or Jana Wendts, Robson has little interest in the stories she presents and isn’t even professional enough to fake it.
“She doesn’t get who her audience is,” a former colleague says. “She can come across as a snob and very elitist.”
And that is why publicists keep her away from all but the friendliest journalists.
When she mixed with journalists at the biggest story this year, it all began to unravel. Robson went to Beaconsfield, along with the rest of the country’s media, where her show-pony demeanour put a lot of people instantly offside. She suffered a barrage of bad publicity which, surprisingly, she addressed on air. Although aspects of the reports about her conduct in Tasmania were untrue – she did not have a Winnebago just for her hair and make-up – she was the only host to abandon the rescue scene and fly to Melbourne for the Logies. “You could not have imagined Melissa Doyle or Tracy Grimshaw leaving the story for the awards,” one journalist says.
It is these traits that have given her the reputation of being more Frontline than Frontline, the satirical ABC program from the 1990s. That and her constant raising of her eyebrows and her comments after stories, such as “Mmm, disturbing” and “Mmm, not touching that one”.
“She is the Mike Moore of Channel 7,” one of Seven’s Sydney journalists says, referring to her similarity to the Rob Sitch character in Frontline.
Unlike Grimshaw, Robson is a presenter rather than a journalist. Like the great Brian “Hendo” Henderson, Nine’s former Sydney newsreader, Robson has no great journalistic background. A university drop-out, Robson worked in Britain during her 20s but the first media organisation to be named on her CV is Personal Success magazine, where she says she was assistant editor and features writer in 1989. In 1990 she joined Seven, and three weeks later was reading the news on Steve Vizard’s Tonight Live, presumably based on her presentation and looks. The Californian-born beauty, who turns 43 this month, appears to have no affinity with the grotty neighbour-welfare bludger-rip-off merchant staples she fronts so confidently every night on TT. But as television is all about smoke and mirrors, it’s working for Seven, so why change it?
Says Turner: “She is one of the great puzzles in broadcasting but she has been a successful presenter for a long time.”