We’re continuing our monthly blog series of campaigns that we loved outside of Midas. In March, we saw a collaboration between The Arsenal midfielder, Bukayo Saka, and the popular South African franchise, Nando’s, in the creation of a new “sweet, spicy, and smoky” recently added to the Peri Peri arsenal for a limited time on March 19th.
The 22-year-old footballer is a long-time fan of the restaurant. His father, who’s had a past birthday party held in the establishment, was the last test of approval for the sauce before it would be sent out to every location in the UK.
Not only has he traversed past the football field and into the cooking arena, he’s also tried his hand at acting for this campaign in addition to the “This Must Be the Place” Nando’s advert from the beginning of March that received over 131K likes. The mini-movie for this campaign, Yes Chef, follows Saka in the kitchen in the process of cooking up the recipe for this new sauce, including the most important ingredient on the end: a little chili pepper. Influencers flocked to their socials to post their reviews.
Liv, of the popular TikToker duo @livandcameasty, announced to her 350K followers: “Love that!” when trying the sauce. Fellow Arsenal teammate, Declan Rice, tried the sauce with its creator in an Instagram story now found on an X post that amassed 150K views.
The sauce bottle’s viral chili pepper, designed by Reuben Dangoor, can be seen on billboards around London across OOH and social, with BVOD also launching this week. Both the footballer and the restaurant contributed to the frenzy by posting on their socials with one of Nando’s X posts being as simple as “PERi-PERi Saka sauce” followed by “that’s it” and “that’s the tweet” accumulating 11K likes for the first post.
The campaign, created in collaboration with creative agency New Commercial Arts, media agency Zenith, and social media agency Born Social, was celebrated by Nandos Head of Brand, Hannah Smith, who applauded the “multi-channel campaign” across Nando’s platforms and ensuring that the taste of the brand-new flavour is definitely something to talk about.
