Sainsbury’s ad showcase hits a hitch
Surely things couldn’t get any worse for Sainsbury’s. Poor sales growth, falling market share, swathes of job cuts, and the final grudging acceptance that no one, consumers or staff, liked John Cleese marching around shouting. To try to revive its fortunes Sainsbury’s charged M&C Saatchi with creating a new ad campaign, which it chose to showcase at its annual results press conference.
But in a cruel twist of fate, the projection system went on the blink and a blank screen greeted the assembled hacks instead of the life-affirming film they had been told to expect.
This left chief executive Dino Adriano to fill in time like Dale Winton at his improvisational best.
But Adriano cracked, his “making light of it” banter dried up and he resorted to levelling impatient comments at the person behind the projector’s curtain, subsequently revealed as one of the 20,000 applying for new jobs at Tesco.
