Savanna is one of the most popular cider brands in South Africa. It uses dry, deadpan humour in all its ‘quirky’ communication.

The objectives of the radio communication were to create brand awareness and build on Savanna’s pay-off line, ‘Its dry, but you can drink it’.

Barman Larry offers his advice, but always gets it wrong, due to the double meaning in the problem, and the fact that he takes everything so literally. The misunderstanding, coupled with his deadpan delivery, give the spots a distinct dry humour that has become synonymous with Savanna.

However, the promotion began with the prize. And our prize needed to be extraordinary. So we gave consumers respite from the economic crisis: a R15,000 ($2,000) salary for the next 5½ years. Then, using various touchpoints, we asked consumers to “retrench themselves” in our “Retrench yourself” promotion. In-store and in restaurants, consumers posted retrenchment letters to “The Chairman of The Bored”. Online, consumers clocked in hours online for avoiding work. And on regional radio stations, employees won back the office. Eventually, “The Chairman” was crowned the single winner at one of six office parties held nationwide.

Not only did client and consumer respond to the promotion, media owners did too. Some even offered free media space to showcase the promotion. Within a week of going live, a cult following had developed online. In only two days, we’d received 6000 radio promotion sms messages, growing to 18,000 five days later. Within a month, the website had been visited 12,000 times, each visit lasting more than 10 minutes. By the end of the six-week promotion, over 3,000 retrenchment letters had been sent online, over 60,000 sms messages had been received and we’d reached page 1 on Google and Twitter.