By Leigh Andrews

The talk focused on the 2006 Nando’s advertising campaign, of which Hamburger was Creative Director, and for which he won a Gold Loerie Award. Hamburger spoke about the ways in which the campaign aimed to draw on imagery from ‘Lusaphone Africa’ - Mozambique in particular - as a source of inspiration, playing with the symbols of post-colonial Africa, such as revolution and liberation, contextualising this against a backdrop of ways in which emergent South African visual identities were represented throughout the campaign.

Hamburger began by describing his love of comedy, and how this influenced the Nando’s advertising campaign in question. Among his favourite comedians are Bill Hicks, who encouraged advertisers to “kill yourself, for the good of all of us”, and John Ward, who felt that advertising is created by people who imagine they are artists, and assessed by people who think they are scientists. Hamburger described himself as someone who always sees the negative, but that this is not necessarily a bad thing, stating that Murphy’s Law (that if something can go wrong, it probably will) should not be seen as a ‘downer’, but rather as encouragement to be proactive and think ahead. He stated that the ability to discern between what is funny and what is not funny is the first sign of intelligence – “your mind is your sharpest tool.” Added to this, we don’t usually laugh randomly – we respond to something. Hamburger mentioned that as a white Jewish man, black comedians like Lenny Bruce and Bill Cosby taught him that there’s always a different perspective to be taken on any situation. Hamburger was also influenced by graphic novels and the absurdist English humour of shows such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which illuminated the ‘stupidity of apartheid’ for him, more than anything he could see outside his front door.

Wim Wenders once stated that every film is a documentary. Hamburger identifies with this, as he feels whatever you are capturing on film, whether through photographs; home movies; or music videos, we are documenting life. Hamburger added that storytelling is not always a matter of fact. An interesting take on this came from Werner Hertzog, who claimed to be seeking ‘ecstatic truth’ from his filmmaking, and famously hypnotised the actors he was filming in Heart of Glass, in order to better control them by ‘accessing their unconscious’ to make it seem as though they were in a collective trance – the actors appeared dopey and sleepy on set as a result. Another influence in Hamburger’s thinking was Senegalese filmmaker, Djibril Diop Mambety's dark comedy, Hyenas, which highlighted the role of power in a post-colonial world, and got him thinking about ‘who creates order/ destroys reality?’, as well as the idea of an individual rooted in black consciousness. Hamburger feels that Mambety is peerless and an inspiration in this sense.

With this in mind, Hamburger added that he is not a designer or filmmaker, and does not have a background in the field – he therefore doesn’t know all the rules of putting a successful TVC together, yet. In 2006, Hamburger worked with Porky Hefer, Executive Creative Director at Lowe Bull, on the Nando’s campaigns. They decided on the tagline ‘chicken is the African hamburger’, as Nando’s had, up to then, been seen as ‘Portuguese South African’, without strong African roots or relativity. The intention was to ‘reclaim an African image’ and make the black middle-class comfortable with Nando’s as an African brand. Hamburger has similar hopes that the 2010 FIFA World Cup will change the way South Africa sees itself in relation to the rest of Africa.

The first step was to change the packaging and in-store branding of Nando’s stores, with the use of brown paper bags with ‘potato print’ imagery. For the accompanying campaign, Hamburger and Hefer decided to use the ‘mockumentary’ style with entertaining, outrageous characters with an element of truth. Hamburger mentions that This is Spinal Tap was an influential film in this regard, and became a touchstone for much of today’s filmmaking. Within three days of brainstorming, the team had devised and shot a full ad, focused on the history of peri-peri, which was shot in Mozambique. Copywriter, Slade Gill, then devised scripts for three similar TVCs that would be slightly longer in length than the typical TV ad, at around two minutes. The ads featured a blind boxer who ate Nando’s to beat his opponents; a pigeon racer, who noticed his favourite pigeon, Barbara, had gone missing… while his neighbour has a mysterious bottle of Nando’s sauce on his windowsill; and the entertaining puppet-master who accidentally eats one of his finger puppets while devouring Nando’s chicken (the infamous ‘Tony Moneo’ puppet). Hamburger feels the ads ‘worked’ because they follow the idea of a testimonial, treating the viewer with respect as we are ‘in on the joke’ from the start. He added that Africa is seen as dirty, chaotic, and messy by the outside world, and wanted to promote the positives of our township culture in the ads, quoting Kuli Roberts who has stated, “We, the Model Cs, are the lab rats of the new South Africa.” This points to the need for ownership of truth and class in South Africa, where artists are starting to use humour as a weapon. Hamburger feels that advertising needs to play a positive social role, and that we have a problem with ‘perfection’ – Africa is colourful, and its warm colours invoke a communal atmosphere, which the team recreated in the Nando’s campaign, as cold, clean colours bring to mind a disconnected, ‘unAfrican’ society.

Hamburger also showed the Nando’s ‘chicken steak’ ad, featuring the late John Matshikiza, and pointed out that this use of ‘a dictator’ in post-colonial society is now proving popular in attention grabbing ads such as the Vodacom dictator ‘We been having it’ ad, and also showed us the South African classic Halls ‘alien abduction’ TVC.

Hamburger ended with a quote from Miles Young, the global CEO of Ogilvy, who says that advertising has been reduced to ‘interrupting the interruptions’. He feels there’s a need for advertising to move from being a mere interruption, to a whole new form of content that the audience pays attention to.

The next design lecture will be held on 27 July. For more information, visit www.uj.ac.za/artscentre.