Guinness - Advertising

Advertising

The Guinness harp motif is modelled on the Trinity College Harp. It was adopted in 1862 by the then proprietor, Benjamin Lee Guinness. Harps have been a symbol of Ireland at least since the reign of Henry VIII. Guinness registered their harp as a trademark shortly after the passing of the Trade Marks Registration Act of 1875. It faces right instead of left, and so can be distinguished from the Irish coat of arms.

Since the 1930s in the face of falling sales, Guinness has had a long history of marketing campaigns, from award-winning television advertisements to beer mats and posters. Before then, Guinness had almost no advertising, instead allowing for word of mouth to sell the product.

Guinness's iconic stature is partly due to its advertising. The most notable and recognisable series of advertisements was created by S.H. Benson's advertising, primarily drawn by the artist John Gilroy, in the 1930s and 1940s. Benson created posters that included phrases such as "Guinness for Strength", "Lovely Day for a Guinness", "Guinness Makes You Strong," "My Goodness My Guinness," (or, alternatively, "My Goodness, My Christmas, It's Guinness!") and most famously, "Guinness is Good For You". The posters featured Gilroy's distinctive artwork and more often than not featured animals such as a kangaroo, ostrich, seal, lion and notably a toucan, which has become as much a symbol of Guinness as the harp. (An advertisement from the 1940s ran with the following jingle: "Toucans in their nests agree/Guinness is good for you/Try some today and see/What one or toucan do.") Dorothy L. Sayers and Bobby Bevan copywriters at Benson's also worked on the campaign; a biography of Sayers notes that she created a sketch of the toucan and wrote several of the adverts in question. Guinness advertising paraphernalia, notably the pastiche booklets illustrated by Ronald Ferns, attract high prices on the collectible market.

Many of the best known Guinness television commercials of the 1970s and 1980s were created by British director, Len Fulford.

In 1983 a conscious marketing decision was made to turn Guinness into a "cult" beer in the UK, amidst declining sales. The move was judged successful, halting the sales decline, and Guinness has arguably been marketed as a cult beer in the UK and America ever since. The Guardian described the management of the brand:

"they've spent years now building a brand that's in complete opposition to cheap lagers, session drinking and crowds of young men boozing in bars. They've worked very hard to help Guinness drinkers picture themselves as twinkly-eyed, Byronic bar-room intellectuals, sitting quietly with a pint and dreaming of poetry and impossibly lovely redheads running barefoot across the peat. You have a pint or two of Guinness with a slim volume of Yeats, not eight mates and a 19 pint bender which ends in tattoos, A&E and herpes from a hen party."

In the late 1980s and early 1990s in the UK there was a multi-award-winning series of "darkly" humorous adverts, featuring actor Rutger Hauer, with the theme "Pure Genius", extolling its qualities in brewing and target market.

The 1994–1995 Anticipation campaign, featuring actor Joe McKinney dancing to "Guaglione" by Perez Prado while his pint settled, became a legend in Ireland and put the song to number one in the charts for several weeks. The advertisement was also popular in the UK where the song reached number two.

In 2000, Guinness's 1999 advertisement Surfer was named the best television commercial of all time in a UK poll conducted by The Sunday Times and Channel 4. This advertisement is inspired by the famous 1980s Guinness TV and cinema ad, "Big Wave", centred on a surfer riding a wave while a bikini-clad sun bather takes photographs. The 1980s advertisement not only remained a popular iconic image in its own right but also entered the Irish cultural memory through inspiring a well known line in Christy Moore's 1985 song "Delirium Tremens". Surfer was produced by the advertising agency Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO; the advertisement can be downloaded from their website.

Guinness won the 2001 Clio Award as the Advertiser of the Year, citing the work of five separate ad agencies around the world.

In 2003 the Guinness TV campaign featuring Tom Crean won the gold Shark Award at the International Advertising Festival of Ireland, while in 2005 their Irish Christmas campaign won a silver Shark. This TV ad has been run every Christmas since 2003 and features pictures of snow falling in places around Ireland, evoking the James Joyce story The Dead, finishing at St. James's Gate Brewery with the line "Even at the home of the black stuff they dream of a white one".

Their UK commercial noitulovE, first broadcast in October 2005, was the most-awarded commercial worldwide in 2006. In it, three men drink a pint of Guinness, then begin to both walk and evolve backward. Their 'reverse evolution' passes through an ancient homo sapiens, a monkey, a flying lemur, a pangolin, an ichthyosaur and a velociraptor until finally settling on a mud skipper drinking dirty water, which then expresses its disgust at the taste of the stuff, followed by the line "Good Things Come To Those Who Wait". The official name of the ad is "Noitulove" – which is "Evolution" backwards. This was later modified to have a different endings to advertise Guinness Extra Cold, often shown as "break bumpers" at the beginning and end of commercial breaks. The second endings show either the homo sapiens being suddenly frozen in a block of ice, the ichthyasaurs being frozen while swimming, or the pool of muddy water freezing over as the mud skipper takes a sip, freezing his tongue to the surface.

Two further advertisements in 2006 and early 2007, "Hands" and "St. Patrick's Hands" were created by animator Michael Schlingmann for Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO. They feature a pair of hands, animated in stop motion under a rostrum camera. "Hands" focuses on the 119.53 seconds it takes to pour a pint and "St. Patrick's Hands is a spoof of "Riverdance", with the animated hands doing the dancing.

Guinness's 2007 advertisement, directed by Nicolai Fuglsig and filmed in Argentina, is entitled "Tipping Point". It involves a large-scale domino chain-reaction and, with a budget of £10m, is the most expensive advertisement by the company so far.

And in 2009, the "To Arthur" advertisement, which started with two friends realising the long history, hail each other by lifting up their glass and saying "to Arthur!". The hailing slowing spread throughout the bar itself to the streets outside, which accuminates to around the world. The advertisement end with the voiceover, "Join the worldwide celebration, of a man named Arthur".

The event is now known as Guinness Arthur's Day. "Arthur's Day is a series of events and celebrations taking place around the world to celebrate the life and legacy of Arthur Guinness and the much-loved Guinness beer which Arthur brought to the world." It took place for the third time at 17:59pm on 22 September 2011.