Sasol's 'This Isn't Just Any Fuel #ThisIsGlugGlug' by FCB Joburg revived a beloved 1991 creative property to rank No. 1 in Kantar's best-liked ads for 2019.
Sasol Brings Back Glug-Glug to Redefine Retail Fuel in South Africa
Sasol's 'This Isn't Just Any Fuel #ThisIsGlugGlug' is a 2019 South African television and integrated campaign created by FCB Joburg that revived the brand's beloved 1991 Glug-Glug creative property to reposition Sasol's retail fuel offer around quality, performance, and emotional heritage.
The campaign launched across all television media channels on 3 April 2019, as reported by sasol.com. From there it expanded into a fully integrated media presence spanning online digital channels, billboards on major South African roads and highways, airport advertising at OR Tambo, Lanseria, Cape Town International, and King Shaka, and street-pole signage across key urban corridors. This breadth of media deployment signalled that Sasol was not pursuing a niche fuel-quality message but was instead making a broad cultural statement to the South African motoring public.
The campaign carried a dual strategic purpose. It communicated Sasol's technical fuel superiority to existing brand loyalists while simultaneously introducing the Glug-Glug platform to a new generation of South African drivers who had no direct memory of the 1991 original. According to Little Black Book, FCB Joburg Chief Creative Officer Ahmed Tilly described the ambition precisely: the work was designed to remind those who already knew Sasol about the magic of Glug-Glug and to bring that same magic to consumers encountering it for the first time. A concurrent retail promotion, the Fill-up campaign, ran alongside the brand film to convert the emotional momentum into forecourt footfall, tying brand sentiment directly to commercial action in the South African retail fuel market. Clapboard Score for this campaign is 68 out of 100, reflecting strong cultural resonance and creative craft set against limited publicly available performance documentation.
Sasol operates in South Africa's retail fuel sector, a market where functional parity between competing brands is the default consumer perception. In South Africa, motorists encounter broadly similar pump prices set by government regulation, which means competing on price alone is structurally impossible for any fuel retailer. The strategic challenge FCB Joburg identified was therefore not a price or distribution problem but a perception problem: how does a brand with genuine technical differentiation make that differentiation feel real and meaningful at the moment a consumer chooses a forecourt?
The answer lay in heritage rather than specification. Sasol's 1991 Super 100 Glug-Glug commercial, originally created by Lindsay Smithers FCB, had achieved the rare status of a genuinely loved South African advertising property. According to Mediaupdate Co Za, that original film featured a young boy, a toy Sasol pump, and a toy Ferrari that transformed after being refuelled, with a Jack Russell dog completing the cast. The emotional warmth of that piece had persisted in South African cultural memory for nearly three decades. FCB Joburg's insight was that this latent affection constituted an underutilised brand asset of considerable value.
In the South African context, where competitors such as BP and Shell also invest heavily in brand-level communications, Sasol's decision to anchor its differentiation in a specific and proprietary creative lineage rather than generic performance claims represented a meaningful strategic departure. Mohamed Carrim, Head of Retail at Sasol Energy, stated according to bizcommunity.com that the campaign's objective was to provide customers with high quality, high performance fuel, framing the Glug-Glug revival as the emotional expression of a functional truth. The campaign also incorporated Sasol's women's soccer sponsorship as a secondary positioning element, connecting the brand to national sporting identity alongside its technical credentials.
Ahmed Tilly led the creative vision for the campaign as Chief Creative Officer at FCB Johannesburg. The core creative team, as documented by sasol.com, comprised Bonginkosi Luvuno as creative director, Yenani Madikwa and Nhlanhla Ngcobo as copywriters, and Fezi Mpembe as art director, with Kabelo Lehlongwane serving as strategic director on the brief.
The creative execution centred on a television film that consciously echoed the visual and emotional grammar of the 1991 original while reframing it for a contemporary South African audience. According to adsoftheworld.com, the 2019 work revived the iconography of the earlier commercial — the red Ferrari, the Jack Russell, the child — and brought those elements into a modern storytelling context. The deliberate callback was not mere nostalgia tourism. It served a structural purpose: by visually quoting the 1991 film, the new work activated dormant brand memory in older viewers while creating a sense of mythic backstory for younger ones encountering Glug-Glug for the first time.
The campaign's tone avoided the technical register that fuel advertising frequently defaults to in the automotive and industrial category. Rather than leading with engine protection metrics or octane ratings, the film leaned into warmth, wonder, and the almost magical quality that the Glug-Glug sonic device had always implied — that Sasol fuel does something transformative. This emotional framing was carried through consistently across the out-of-home executions at airports including OR Tambo and King Shaka, as well as the highway billboard network, ensuring that the brand experience remained coherent whether a consumer encountered it on television, at the roadside, or at a departure gate. Ahmed Tilly noted to lbbonline.com that being part of this creative story represented a massive privilege, a comment that reflects the degree to which the team understood they were working with a genuinely rare piece of South African advertising heritage.
No verified third-party performance data regarding sales uplift, market share movement, or return on advertising spend for the ThisIsGlugGlug campaign is publicly available. What the public record does establish, however, is an audience reception result that is objectively exceptional by any standard of South African advertising measurement.
According to Kantar, the campaign ranked number one in Kantar Adtrack's Best Liked Ads for the second quarter of 2019 in South Africa. Kantar's Adtrack methodology measures consumer response to advertising across the South African market on an ongoing basis, making a top ranking in any quarter a significant competitive achievement. The campaign then sustained that standing across the full year: according to Kantar, it ranked as the number one overall best-liked advertisement in South Africa for 2019 in its entirety. To achieve that position in a full-year ranking, a campaign must perform consistently across multiple quarters against competition from every category of advertising running in the South African market, not only within the automotive or fuel sector.
This result is structurally significant because likeability in advertising research is directly correlated with brand recall, message retention, and purchase consideration. A campaign that achieves best-liked status in a regulated, price-parity market like South African retail fuel is doing precisely the strategic work it was designed to do: it is making a functionally commoditised choice feel emotionally meaningful. The Clapboard editorial team notes that the 68/100 Clapboard Score reflects the campaign's genuine creative and cultural achievement while acknowledging that the absence of publicly documented commercial metrics limits a full effectiveness assessment.
Sasol's ThisIsGlugGlug is a 2019 South African integrated campaign created by FCB Joburg. It revived the brand's iconic 1991 Glug-Glug creative property to communicate fuel quality and emotional heritage to both existing loyalists and a new generation of South African motorists across television, digital, billboard, and airport media.
Sasol launched the campaign on 3 April 2019 across South African television, according to sasol.com. It extended to digital channels, highway billboards, street-pole signage, and airport advertising at OR Tambo, Lanseria, Cape Town International, and King Shaka airports throughout the South African market.
Ahmed Tilly served as Chief Creative Officer at FCB Johannesburg on the campaign. The creative team included Bonginkosi Luvuno as creative director, copywriters Yenani Madikwa and Nhlanhla Ngcobo, art director Fezi Mpembe, and strategic director Kabelo Lehlongwane, as documented by sasol.com.
The original Glug-Glug commercial was created in 1991 by Lindsay Smithers FCB for Sasol's Super 100 fuel. According to mediaupdate.co.za, it featured a young boy, a toy Sasol pump, a red Ferrari, and a Jack Russell dog, and became one of South Africa's most fondly remembered advertising properties.
The campaign ranked number one in Kantar Adtrack's Best Liked Ads for Q2 2019 in South Africa, according to Kantar. It then held the top position as the overall best-liked advertisement in South Africa for the full year 2019, an exceptional result in a market where fuel brands compete on regulated, uniform pricing.
The Clapboard Score for Sasol's ThisIsGlugGlug campaign is 68 out of 100. The score recognises strong creative craft, proven audience likeability, and the effective use of brand heritage in the South African retail fuel market, while reflecting the limited availability of publicly documented commercial performance metrics.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
