As the story of the advertising campaign which ended Pinochet's brutal rule is told in a new film 'No', Paul Kendall talks to the men who smashed a dictatorship.
The story of that campaign and how García and a small group of fellow
advertising executives, the Mad Men of Eighties Chile, risked their lives to
stand up against Pinochet and, employing all their advertising nous, inspired a
nation to overthrow one of the world’s most repressive regimes, has now been
dramatised in a new film, No, which opens in UK
cinemas this week and is nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language
film. For fans of a certain television series about advertising folk in
Sixties New York, it’s a reminder that advertising can, sometimes, be used as a
force for good rather than a psychological weapon to make people feel bad about
themselves and buy things they don’t need. Its hero, played by Gael García
Bernal (a composite of García and his colleague, José Manuel Salcedo), is no Don
Draper.
