Newsmakers: The director of the famous 'Bugger' ad

The Toyota 'Bugger' ad made 25 years ago almost never made it to air.

The client was squeamish about the language.

Director Tony Williams told 1News he was called to a meeting.

"The agency asked me if I would accompany them because the client for Toyota was demanding to speak to the director to get my impressions. And he said, 'Well, what do you think? Do you think there's going to be offence?'

"I said, 'Look, I'm sure you're going to get some people write in and complaining. And I think that it's so funny the humour of the ad will overcome the complaints.'

"I said, 'I think you've got to be daring and bold and give it a shot.'"

He was confident in the advertisement's success.

"I said, 'It would be a great loss to advertising if this ad doesn't get made.' And he looked at me and there's a bit of a pause and he said, 'Be it on your head, we'll give it a go'."

He was right, there were complaints. The 1999 commercial still holds the record for our most complained about advert of all time.

One hundred and twenty complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Authority but the eight-person board ruled it was distinctly New Zealand and relevant to rural humour.

The advert shows the hapless farmer pushing a fence over with his ute, smashing up an outdoor toilet and pulling the front wheels of a tractor, all with the response "bugger".

It's the only word in the whole advert so casting the farmer was crucial. Williams said they had to go to Australia to find someone who gave it the right inflection.

"I'm ashamed to say, had to go across the ditch to Sydney, and we found this actor who brought a lovely lyrical sound to the word 'bugger', and he had lots of variations on it.

"So in the testing, he gave lots of different versions of the word bugger. So when we shot each scenario, whatever it was happening, at the end of it, when he had to turn and look and say bugger, I had him say as many variations on the word as he could think of, from explosive, expressive, to lyrical, to quietly spoken, and then in the editing, we decided which went best with each sequence. So there was no two buggers alike, if you like."

But even though the main actor hailed from Australia, the Australian office of Toyota was not keen to run the same ad.

"They thought we couldn't possibly put this on air like this and then they said 'Could we change, could we dub the word balderdash over the word bugger?'"

"I just looked at them said 'No.'

"Can't be done and shouldn't be done."

Williams believes each little vignette was funny even without the word bugger.

He thought he had a hit on his hands when the producer at the advertising agency first saw it on a weekend with his young son.

"I said, 'I've got to cut together, would you like to come over.'

"He popped over and he brought his eight-year-old son with him, and he explained to his son, 'We're just going to look at this ad, which Tony's just finished, and see what you think of it'.

"And we played the ad, and when it got to the final scene, where the dog says, bugger, this little eight-year-old boy started screaming with laughter. And he fell off his chair and was rolling on the floor, laughing at the set off, and Howard looked at me and said, 'I think the ad's approved'."

The dog became something of a national hero. Named Hercules, he went on to star in other adverts and movies.

He was doing a school safety video in 2004 when he died, and thousands sent cards and tributes to his trainer Mark Vette.

The advert, recently voted the best Kiwi ad in the last 50 years by the New Zealand Marketing Association, went on to win multiple international awards.

Williams was also responsible for the BASF 'Dear John' advert from the 1970s and the Crunchie 'gold rush' ad from the 1980s.

The latter went on to be the longest running advert in Australasia.

It was the first advert Tony made with his own company in Wellington, and all he got out of it was a lawn mower.

"I'd overspent the budget and I had to go into overdraft. So I couldn't pay myself for making the ad. And when the agency learned that, they came to my house.

"Roger from Colenso, and he said, 'Oh, the agency would like to give you an appreciation of thanks for what you've done' and opened his boot and took out a motor mower.

"So that was my payment for the longest running ad in New Zealand."

This proven commercial genius said the secret to a good commercial is to forget what you're selling.

"The agency's job is to market the product of their client and find a way of writing a script that's going to work.

"My job is to represent the audience and to make it accessible to them so that I reach the audience so that they can be entertained.

"And if you can make an ad that people actually don't flick the television off or change channels, you've succeeded."

The 'Bugger' ad rates right up there in Williams' body of work because of people's reaction to when he tells them he made it — people always remember it.

"I would be happy to have made an ad that actually reaches the heart of every New Zealander than make some crappy feature film that no one goes into the cinema to see."