> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # One Post, Five Families and a Chairman in Paris - URL: https://giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io/one-post-five-families-and-a-chairman-in-paris/ - Published: 2026-09-11T15:10:04.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-11T15:10:04.000Z - Description: The Glenlivet's apology calls it an influencer post. Almost every writeup calls it an ad. Those are two different pipelines and most brands only gate one of them. Five families answered, and the demand went past the brand to a chairman in Paris. Plus pasteable copy, the still and a five shot video. - Author: giovanni gallucci - Tags: Organic Social, Crisis Response, Brand Positioning, Social Platforms, Social Media Train Wrecks *Listen to this episode of Social Media Train Wrecks, then use the piece below.* The Glenlivet's apology calls it an influencer post. Almost every writeup I've read calls it an ad. Those are two different production chains inside the same company, with two different briefs and two different people holding the stop button. If you run social for a food or beverage brand, you probably have a real review gate on one of them. The post that ended [The Glenlivet's](https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-glenlivet/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) August went out through the other one. ## What actually happened At the end of August, the brand's South Africa channel posted a black and white spot starring the actor Dineo Langa. She walks a corridor hung with portraits of five South African liberation figures, among them Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Lilian Ngoyi and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn. There's a voiceover of Madikizela-Mandela's own voice. Langa is holding a glass of Glenlivet 18. The march they borrowed is August 9, 1956\. More than twenty thousand women walked on the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest the pass laws. South Africa marks the day every year and it's a public holiday. Williams-De Bruyn was eighteen years old at that march. The whisky is aged eighteen years. [eNCA reported](https://www.enca.com/news-top-stories/history-not-marketing-gimmick-stalwarts-families-slam-glenlivet-advert?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) that the parallel between her age and the maturation statement sat at the centre of the backlash. That coincidence is the concept. Read the spot twice and there isn't a second idea underneath it. Drink is not a neutral prop in that country either. The families' statement names the dop system, the practice of paying farm workers partly in alcohol to keep them dependent, and says that history makes putting liquor advertising beside the women of 1956 "entirely incomprehensible." The ladder went up fast. Regular people first. Then ANC spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri, who posted that the women's legacies "are not marketing props" and the ad had to come down. Then the Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities, Sindisiwe Chikunga. On August 28 the brand pulled the post and put out a joint apology with Langa. Six days after that, the families answered. ## The apology described a smaller crime than the one they committed Here's the brand's text, in full, [as carried by The Spirits Business](https://www.thespiritsbusiness.com/2026/09/glenlivet-apology-completely-misses-the-mark-after-ad-backlash/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io): "The Glenlivet unreservedly apologises for a recent influencer post which drew on the legacy of the 1956 Women's March. We acknowledge the offence that this has caused and have deleted the post. We are investigating how this post was conceptualised and approved to make sure this does not happen again." On the checklist that scores well. Fast, owns it, promises a review. It also leans the entire weight of the thing on one word, and that word is offence. Offence is a feelings word. It puts the reader's reaction at the centre of the sentence. The families read it and [wrote back on September 2](https://www.politicsweb.co.za/news/our-liberation-history-is-not-for-sale-1956-womens-march-families?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) under the title "Our liberation history is not for sale," and their correction runs one line: "An apology that speaks merely of causing 'offence' completely misses the mark. This is a matter of unauthorized corporate appropriation of a national heritage." Williams-De Bruyn is in her late eighties and still here to say it herself. "The advertisement uses my image and the record of a life that my husband and I dedicated entirely to the struggle for freedom. To see that history used to sell alcohol is deeply painful, especially given South Africa's devastating crises of alcohol abuse and Gender-Based Violence. I did not give Glenlivet permission to use my image or legacy." Langa apologized separately on her own account and did better than the company that hired her. "I am sorry for the harm I have caused. I understand the gravity of this mistake and will be more mindful in future." She named the harm. The brand named the mood in the room. ## Three things in this wreck that the coverage mostly walked past **One. The brand's own word for it is influencer post.** Everybody else is calling it an ad or a campaign, which quietly imagines a production chain with a creative director and a legal review and a client approval at the end of it. The apology says the company is "investigating how this post was conceptualised and approved," which is a sentence you only write when you don't yet know. Most brands have a heritage or sensitivity check somewhere in the campaign pipeline. Very few have one anywhere near the creator brief. A creator brief is a product, a posting window and a set of talking points, and it moves in days, because moving in days is the entire reason anybody uses it. **Two. Five families answered a post that most of the coverage says depicted three women.** The September 2 statement came from the families of Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, Lilian Ngoyi, Rahima Moosa, Helen Joseph and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, plus the Lilian Ngoyi Foundation and the Sophie and Henry De Bruyn Legacy Foundation, with four named representatives signing it. When you take a piece of a movement, you don't open a file with the people you put on screen. You open one with everybody in the frame and everybody standing next to them in the history, and they can organize a joint statement faster than a global company can schedule the meeting to discuss it. **Three. The demand skipped the brand entirely.** The families are not asking The Glenlivet South Africa for anything. They named [Pernod Ricard](https://www.linkedin.com/company/pernod-ricard/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io), its [Chivas Brothers](https://www.linkedin.com/company/chivas-brothers/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) division, and chairman Alexandre Ricard, and they want four things: a transparent account of how the campaign was conceived, an explanation of why none of the families were consulted, a direct written apology to the families that sits separate from the public post, and formal accountability through South Africa's [Advertising Regulatory Board](https://www.arb.org.za/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io). A channel manager in Johannesburg posted it. A chairman in Paris got handed the bill. [The Citizen reported](https://www.citizen.co.za/lifestyle/1956-womens-march-families-reject-glenlivet-apology/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) that nobody at any of those companies had publicly responded to the families as of its writing, and I could not locate a public response since. ## What this costs you if you run a food or beverage brand You are probably not one whisky post away from a national holiday's worth of headlines. You are closer to this than you think anyway, because the borrow is the ordinary stuff of this category. A heritage recipe. A grandmother on the label. A regional name on a SKU. An indigenous ingredient with a story attached to it. A founder origin that belongs to a community and not to the founder. Every one of those is a permission question, and the answer usually lives with somebody nobody has asked. The wreck here isn't that a brand set out to steal something. It's that a fast pipeline with no heritage question in it will walk into somebody's history at the speed of a posting calendar, and the first person to find out is the family. Three things you can ship today. This is a negative story, so all three are about getting out from under it before it lands on you. ## 1\. The pasteable copy If your brand carries a borrowed story, post the permission. Publish who you asked, what they said, and what they get out of it. Do it while nobody is demanding it, because doing it after a complaint is a defense and doing it now is a position. Fill in the brackets and put this up: *"Our \[product\] is named for \[place or person\]. We didn't just like the sound of it. Here's who we asked: \[name\], \[relationship to the place or the family\]. Here's what we agreed to: \[royalty, credit, donation, an ongoing say in how it gets used\]. If we ever use that name in a way you think we haven't earned, tell us and we'll fix it. The people a story belongs to get the last word on how it's told. Not the people selling it."* If your brand carries no borrowed story, say that out loud instead. "Nobody's grandmother is on this label. We made it up in a rented kitchen in 2019." Honest is a position. Invented heritage is a liability sitting quietly on your packaging waiting for somebody with a search bar. ## 2\. The still Shoot the person, not the aesthetic. One frame: the actual human whose story you licensed, in their own space, holding your product or sitting next to it. Natural light, no set dressing, no sepia wash, no hands-of-a-farmer close-up with nobody's face in it. Their name in the caption, spelled right, and their words instead of yours. The tell that separates a real permission from a costume is whether the person is identifiable. Anonymous heritage imagery is what you shoot when you don't have anybody to name. ## 3\. The video, fifteen to thirty seconds, shoot it this afternoon Five shots. Phone is fine. No music bed. - **0:00 to 0:04.** Product on the counter, tight. Founder's voice off camera: "The name on this comes from somewhere real." - **0:04 to 0:11.** Cut to the founder on camera, mid shot, no desk in the frame. "So we drove out and asked." Name the person and the place out loud. - **0:11 to 0:19.** Cut to the person who gave the permission, on camera, saying in their own words what they agreed to. Do not script this. One take, whatever they say. - **0:19 to 0:25.** Two shot, both of them, no dialogue, four seconds of them just standing there. That's the whole proof. - **0:25 to 0:30.** Back to the product. Founder voiceover: "If we get it wrong, she'll be the first one to tell us." Hard cut, no end card. Then there's the internal one, and it's free. Pull up your last twenty creator briefs. Count how many got looked at by anybody whose actual job was to ask whose story this is and whether you're allowed to stand in it. If that number is zero, you just found the gap, and it cost you a cup of coffee instead of a regulator complaint. Write the apology rule down now too, while you're calm and nothing's on fire. When you've actually harmed somebody, name the act and not the feeling. Go to the people before you go to the feed. A public post addressed to nobody in particular is a press release wearing an apology's clothes, and that is precisely the thing still generating headlines for a whisky brand two weeks after it deleted the post. ## The show This one came off this week's episode of [Social Media Train Wrecks](https://giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io/social-media-train-wrecks/), where chloe dawn and I pulled up to the crash site and went through the wreckage. The show is the briefing. This piece is the extension. What you post on Monday is the part that counts. [Subscribe on Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id6785348442?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) and it's there every week. If your feed keeps wandering into other people's stories because the calendar said it was a good week for it, that's a strategy problem, and it's a fixable one. [Come find me on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/galluccinet?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io).