The story behind SA’s favourite ad, Sasol’s ‘glug glug’

South Africa’s favourite TV ad over the past 35 years – as determined by the Kantar group and its Adtrack testing system – was Sasol’s “glug glug” from 1991, done by ad agency Lindsay Smithers FCB (now FCB Joburg).

Kantar’s team tracked down those involved in making the ad: Andriesa Singleton, marketing communications officer for Sasol Oil; Gaby Bush, who was the creative director; and Les Sharpe, the film director.

Their brief was to differentiate Sasol from its competitors, and they did this by defining their meaningful difference as performance, with the strategically brilliant payoff line, “pump up your performance”.

It took just one ad to get this right.

Sharpe said: “It was all shot ‘in camera’ and every detail carefully planned. Post-production didn’t exist back then unless you were a Hollywood director.”

Chris Briggs, the producer from Sharpe Productions, said: “Istvan Gyori, the little boy who acted in the commercial was really young so didn’t really know exactly what the script was. We just started shooting and all of his reactions were shot in real time.”

Describing his memories of the shoot, Gyori said it felt like actual magic, being part of the production, and what you saw was real.

“They even let off a gunshot – I had no idea this was going to happen, so that moment of shock on my face when the car raced off, it was from that.

“I was quite famous after the ad. People stopped me, asking for my autograph – I was so young, I couldn’t even write at the time.

“The team on the shoot were great, it felt like they treated me like an adult.

“I had a bicycle to play with between takes; the shoot took just over a day back then. But as a kid, it felt like forever.”

Bush said: “Even the dog, Roger, was an amateur. Everyone thought he had been trained to perform his trick in the ad.

“Les was playing ball with the dog for a while and then popped the ball in the car. The dog by then was so pumped up that he ended up pushing the car, trying to get the ball out, and this all got captured in the moment.

“Actually, all the effects in the ad were real. We really had a lot of fun, they were the best days of our lives.”

Ironically, the ad never won a Loerie but did win in England, Cannes and the US.

– news@citizen.co.za