Glug Glug
Sasol1991
Glug Glug is a 1991 30-second television commercial for Sasol, created by Lindsay Smithers FCB, Johannesburg.
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The line
Pump up your performance.
Why it works
A small boy playing in his bedroom fills a toy red Ferrari with Sasol Super 100, the fuel going in with a "glug glug". The little car tears across the room, scorching the carpet, and smashes through the wall, leaving the boy staring wide-eyed at the hole. Lindsay Smithers FCB's brief was to set Sasol apart from rival fuels, and it chose to dramatise performance rather than claim it, in a 30-second spot that director Les Sharpe shot in camera, catching the boy's genuinely startled reactions. It is studied as a benchmark for likeability. In 2003 Millward Brown named it South Africa's most loved ad of the previous 20 years, and in 2019 Kantar's Adtrack, built on more than 100,000 tested TV commercials, still ranked it the country's best-liked ad of 35 years. It never won a Loerie, though it did win awards in England, at Cannes and in the US, and Sasol built a series of "Ama-Glug-Glug" ads on it before reviving it again in 2019.
Techniques
- Demonstration A toy car filled with the fuel scorches across a bedroom and smashes through the wall, dramatising performance instead of merely claiming it.
- Humour The boy's genuinely startled stare at the hole in his wall gives the exaggeration a likeable comic payoff.
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