Oggi: Hell Pizza a lawsuit waiting to happen

Hell Pizza has done it again. The fast food outfit has taken out a mobile billboard sporting a photo of Hanover boss Mark Hotchin, juxtaposed with a line for its “Greed” pizza, and parked it on Paratai Drive, near the construction of Mr Hotchin’s $30 million dollar house in progress. (Scroll down for photo.)

The billboard makes fun of the PR crisis over the Hanover boss’ continuing plush lifestyle in spite of the sad fate of the company’s many shareholders.

“Someone said, ‘you can’t call them greedy’ and we said, ‘We’re the people who put condoms in people’s letterboxes, we can do anything',” Hell Pizza spokesperson Matt Blomfield said.

The execution initially ran into a hitch when Hell Pizza approached ad space company Oggi Advertising, which refused to run the billboard unless the heads of Hell Pizza wrote personal guarantees to indemnify it from a lawsuit.

Rather than sign an indemnity, they decided to go ahead and build the billboard themselves. Borrowing a billboard trailer (and with the help of a few items from Bunnings), they knocked up the effort themselves in the back yard.

Mr Blomfield said no legal communication from either Eric Watson or Mark Hotchin had been received as yet.

“I’ve been told through a third party that they said they could see the funny side of it.”

It’s not unusual for space providers to decline an execution, should it be deemed to risky or risqué.

In January this year, iSite declined to run a Murder Burger billboard featuring a headless chicken with the line “Free range tastes better”. It later found a home with OTW.

Oggi head Gordon Frykberg confirmed that he had declined to run the billboard, mostly out of a desire to protect his company from potentially money-sucking legal action – although he admired the execution.

“We require an indemnity to be signed in a case like this and they weren’t prepared to do that.

“I applaud them, they’re pushing the envelope and that’s great, but I’m not prepared to spend thousands and thousands of dollars defending myself against Watson and Hotchin, who have plenty of money to spend.”

Mr Frykberg said in such a situation, the media supplier (Oggi) would be in the first instance answerable to any legal claim. The advertiser hides behind them – hence the need for an indemnity. (The iSite/Murder Burger situation is a little stranger though, as the company would not have been open to legal disputes over a headless chicken, but rather merely the Advertising Standards Authority and the angry public.)

Mr Frykberg said he had learnt “an expensive lesson” in the past after an advertiser took out a billboard featuring a website link that went live the day after the billboard went up (therefore staff at Oggi were unable to check it). The website featured a series of claims about businessman Michael Stiassny, and the resulting legal action cost Oggi $22,000.

In this case, Mr Frykberg said he believes Mr Hotchin could end up looking “a little silly” in front of the disparaging public if he takes issue with Hell Pizza.

Mr Blomfield said if Hell Pizza ends up at the wrong end of a lawsuit, they will consider running a television ad with an 0900 number, so that the public can donate money to support the fight for the right to call Hanover’s bosses greedy.

Hell Pizza puts its money where its mouth is.