Frank Budgen: Advertising film director garlanded with awards for such products as Stella Artois, Sony and Reebok

Budgen: he had been planning to move into feature films, before he was diagnosed with leukaemia

Frank Budgen, who has died of leukaemia at the age of 61, has been described by some in the mad world of advertising as possibly the most talented commercials director the UK has ever produced. Some might disagree with “ever” but few would dispute that he was the most innovative director so far this millennium. In 2012 he was recognised, jointly with Tony Kaye, as the industry’s “Most-Awarded Director” by the highly respected Design & Art Direction (D&AD), which promotes excellence in these fields.

From early in his career, most of his peers predicted he would move from directing adverts to feature films, as did such admen as Ridley Scott and Alan Parker. He was hoping to live that dream when he was diagnosed with leukaemia several years ago.

Budgen was often accorded what is perhaps the greatest accolade in the business, when viewers conclude that the ads are better than the film or programme. His company, Gorgeous Enterprises, now based in Gorgeous House, Portland Mews, Soho, won countless awards; its name allowed its staff to answer the phone with a cheery “Hello, Gorgeous.”

Making commercials is a complex and costly business, from coming up with a bright idea and catchy tagline to getting the final ad on to our screens – the latter being the director’s job. Among Budgen’s most famous works was the “Escape the Sofa” ad for Reebok, in which a scary settee wrestles a young man in his flat. He also helped Nike sales with his TV and cinema ad known as “Tag”, in which the city centre of Toronto gets involved in a game of tag.

Such was Budgen’s talent that the ad was massively successful without it being obvious that the protagonist, Canadian first-time actor Moti Yona, was wearing Nike shoes, and despite the fact that everyone in the ad was outrunning him. Driven by an insistent bongo soundtrack and ending with the words “Nike ... Play,” it won the Cannes Lions International Festival Grand Prix in 2002, considered the industry’s most prestigious award. It has also been voted one of the top 10 ads of the noughties by the media magazine Campaign.

In 1999 Budgen directed one of the great Stella Artois lager advertisements, “the Hero’s Return”, created by the legendary adman Sir Frank Lowe and his staff. A limping, French war hero returns to his father’s bar. When the father offers him a glass of red wine, the hero responds: “Oh no, papa, Stella Artois.” The father obliges, but when the man who saved the hero’s life asks for the same lager, the father pulls the feed pipe from behind the war and says, Oh, sorry, we’ve run out of Stella. The unsaid tagline? It was only good enough for his son. The written tagline: “Reassuringly expensive.”

In 2003, Budgen was the man behind the TV and cinema ad known as “Mountain”, for Sony’s PlayStation 2, which also won the coveted Cannes prize the following year, as well as several other industry awards. Filmed in Rio with a budget of £5m, more than many indy films, it involved 50 stuntmen and acrobats, as well as 500 extras on each day of shooting, fighting to get on top of a human mountain. The soundtrack featured Shirley Temple singing “De Gospel Train”. To Sony, it was money well spent since the ad significantly increased its share of the game console market.

Budgen had directed the first major ad, “Double Life”, for the original PlayStation in 1999, a commercial which spawned many an imitator and finished with the tagline “Do not underestimate the power of PlayStation”, Another of his works, a 2000 ad for Guinness known as “Bet on Black” or “Snail Race”, was filmed in Cuba where men chase racing snails down streets; a snail called Black wins and the men celebrate with pints of Guinness to the tagline “Good things come to those who wait.” The Independent included the ad, along with the others in the same campaign, as “among the greatest advertising of all time.”

For XBox, Budgen did the successful ads known as “Jump Rope” and “Water Balloon”. For Levi’s jeans, he directed “Twisted to Fit”, which implies that if you wear those jeans, your limbs will be completely flexible. His ad for the Sony Bravia LCD TV in 1999 – “Colour like no other”, to a soundtrack of the Rolling Stones’ song “She’s a Rainbow” – used 2.5 tonnes of children’s Play-Doh to have hundreds of multi-coloured bunnies cavort around New York City’s Foley Square.

On a more humanitarian level, Budgen directed a telling commercial for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, in which a cartoon character child is cleverly used to make the point as a real violent man chases it around his home, verbally and physically abusing it until throwing it down the stairs. As the ad goes silent, the camera pans to show a real child lying prone at the bottom of the stairs. “Real children don’t bounce back,” says the tagline.

He also helped raise awareness with a dramatic ad for Cancer Research UK, known in the industry as the “Enemy” ad. A narrator tells us: “Even cancer has an enemy – research ... It’s cancer’s turn to be afraid”. The final frame tells us, “make it sooner.”

Frank Budgen was born in London in 1954, but grew up in East Grinstead, Sussex, before attending what was then Manchester Polytechnic, now Manchester Metropolitan University. He got his first job as a copywriter with the ad agency BBDO, moving on to M&C Saatchi, and later the Boase Massimi Pollitt agency, where he helped create the Guardian’s famous “Points of View” ads, before switching from copywriting to directing with ad for John Smith’s bitter. After joining the Paul Weiland Film Company, he shot campaigns for the mobile phone company Orange, the radio station Capital FM and Holsten lager.

Even after being diagnosed with leukaemia, Budgen continued to push industry boundaries, as with his ad last year for Taylor’s coffee of Harrogate, Yorkshire. In a departure from the usual coffee ads, his kaleidoscopic abstract images suggested how coffee stimulates the brain in the most beautiful of ways.

PHIL DAVISON

Frank Budgen, advertising film director: born London 3 October 1954; two daughters; died London 2 November 2015.