“‘Not Marketing Props’: ANC Slams Glenlivet, Dineo Langa Ad ‘Using Winnie Mandela’s Legacy to Sell Whisky'”
The Citizen reports:
“The now-deleted 75-second black-and-white promotional video, which circulated widely via screen recordings after being pulled from official channels, featured Langa in a tailored light-coloured pantsuit, swirling a glass of Glenlivet whisky as she moved through interior spaces lined with portraits of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Lilian Ngoyi and Sophie Williams-de Bruyn.
“The controversy has reignited debate around the commercial use of liberation history in South African advertising, and where the line sits between honouring struggle icons and exploiting them for brand equity.”
Read complete original article
Other Articles on the Same Topic
- Chikunga Condemns Alcohol Advert Invoking 1956 Women’s March (Nova News)
- Glenlivet Withdraws Advert Invoking 1956 Women’s March After Backlash (The Star)
- “Insensitive”: ANC Slams The Glenlivet Ad Referencing the 1956 Women’s March (The South African)
Assessment
The Glenlivet is a whisky brand owned by Pernod Ricard, the world’s second largest wine and spirits producer. Its South African campaign placed actress and influencer Dineo Langa among portraits of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Lilian Ngoyi and Sophie Williams-de Bruyn, with on-screen text invoking the anti-pass law slogan “Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo” (meaning: you strike a woman, you strike a rock).
The struggle of the women of 1956 cannot and must not be reduced to a marketing gimmick.”
Sindisiwe Chikunga, Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities
An anti-pass law refers to a political movement, campaign, or protest organized to oppose and abolish pass laws, which were oppressive government regulations used to restrict the freedom of movement of Black people and other non-white groups under apartheid and colonial rule in South Africa
The whiskey ad ran during Women’s Month, as South Africa marked 70 years since an estimated 20,000 women marched on the Union Buildings, and it sought to draw a parallel between The Glenlivet 18 and the fact that Williams-de Bruyn was 18 years old when she helped lead that march.
Sindisiwe Chikunga, Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities, strongly condemned Pernod Ricard and their alcohol advertisement, saying:
… the struggle of the women of 1956 cannot and must not be reduced to a marketing gimmick.”
Sindisiwe Chikunga, Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities
Alcohol harm, she said, was among the factors that exacerbated gender-based violence and femicide, family instability, child neglect and interpersonal violence.
Alcohol was never a symbol of the women’s struggle for freedom and should not be retrospectively presented as such for commercial purposes,” she said.
Sindisiwe Chikunga, Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities
The ANC made the same historical point in more detail, pointing to the dop system, under which workers were paid partly in alcohol instead of fair wages – a practice that caused massive alcohol harm in Black and working-class communities. Beer halls were themselves a target of women’s protest in that era.
Pernod Ricard has withdrawn the campaign, apologising for what it called an “influencer post” and saying it is investigating how that post “was conceptualised and approved”. The company is now putting the blame on the Black woman it hired to front the campaign.
But political analyst Tessa Dooms rejects these claims, listing what the 75 second film took to make: “a budget, story boards, a script, production, editing and PR strategy”. Movendi International’s Big Alcohol Exposed analysis of how Pernod Ricard turned the 1956 Women’s March into a whisky ad documents a planned, budgeted campaign that was surely signed off inside the company’s own Code for Commercial Communications.
Big Alcohol targets women as a growth market by attaching its products to empowerment and independence, and research on 2,600 alcohol brand posts on Facebook and Instagram found brands appropriating feminist themes while staying silent about the harm alcohol causes women, including breast cancer and violence. Pernod Ricard has also been accused of hidden marketing through influencers on TikTok and Instagram in France, under that country’s alcohol marketing law.
Evidence reviewed by SAAPA and the South African Medical Research Council shows women whose partners are regularly intoxicated face nearly six times higher risks of gender-based violence.
Marketing limitations are one of the alcohol policy solutions that address that harm, and South Africa’s rules in this area rest largely on the alcohol industry’s own codes – the same codes that let this campaign through. A collection of 14 peer-reviewed papers concluded that alcohol industry self-regulatory codes do not sufficiently protect children and adolescents from exposure to alcohol promotions, particularly on social media, and an analysis of alcohol promotion during the 2014 FIFA World Cup found that marketing practices frequently appeared to breach the alcohol industry’s own voluntary codes.
The Draft Liquor Amendment Bill, published in 2016, would have replaced the alcohol industry’s flawed self-regulation scheme with proper statutory standards for alcohol advertising, promotion, and sponsorship, in a best practice package of raising the age limit and introducing the alcohol industry’s liability for alcohol harm. But the bill has still not been enacted, and research based on freedom of information requests documents alcohol industry involvement in that delay.