Who doesn’t love eating a russian?

It’s true! South Africa is the only country in the world where a nationally favoured delicious sausage is called a russian.

Proudly South African brand, Eskort, is famous for producing SA’s best loved russians and other quality pork products. In line with its edgy marketing, Eskort identified the endless fun to be had with this colourful russian description, through a series of now viral, unbranded spoof videos that capture this would-be ‘misunderstanding’.

“We asked ourselves what would happen if anyone outside of South Africa caught the tail end of the fact that in South Africa, we eat russians (sausages),” says Marcelle Pienaar, Group Marketing Manager at Eskort. “Capturing this fictitious, widely shared misunderstanding was used to tickle South Africa’s funny bone by holding the mirror up for us to see what we often accept as common language or ideas, for what they really are… uniquely local.”

The russian conversation series is the latest in a long line of cheeky, funny, and truly South African content – from adverts to the much-loved tongue-in-the-cheek digi-series, Who Got Chowed featuring the ever-popular Coconut Kelz.

THE BUILD-UP

On Wednesday, 04 August, a video started making the rounds. In it, a Russian is seen reacting to a  ‘focus group video’ where excited South Africans respond to a staged question; ‘So how do you feel about eating russians?’

In the ‘shocking’ video, South Africans share how much they love and enjoy eating russians – deep fried, boiled, microwaved, chopped in half – potentially graphic descriptions to anyone who is not familiar with our colourful way of talking. Unfortunately, a Russian vlogger finds the video and without context he believes he’s looking at South Africans boasting about eating Russians. As you can expect, he goes crazy and tries to involve world leaders and the international media.