Yebo Gogo (Windmills)

Why it works

A white yuppie and his girlfriend stop at a roadside stall where an older Black man sells wire windmills. The yuppie greets him with a would-be-streetwise “Yebo gogo”, accuses him of overcharging, and then locks his keys in the car, while the vendor calmly produces a Vodacom phone. Released in the second half of 1994, as South Africa adjusted to democracy and to its first mobile networks, the spot from Lindsay Smithers FCB made the unflappable Black man the owner of the new technology and the white yuppie the butt of the joke. It is studied as one of the defining ads of the new South Africa, for joking about racial assumptions instead of offering rainbow-nation platitudes, and the Cape Argus later wrote that it broke new ground on race. With actors Kole Omotoso and Michael de Pinna the campaign ran for years, as Vodacom grew past a million subscribers by 1999.