MEDIA&MARKETING:THIS YEAR Guinness celebrates its 250th birthday and, to mark the occasion, the brewer has been rerunning some of its most celebrated television commercials.
Starting with 30 Seconds of Darknessfrom 1974, over the coming months, the Guinness time machine will take couch potatoes down memory lane with Sea Lionand Toucanfrom the 1950s, the Islandfrom 1977 and 1981's Big Wave.
Guinness advertising is as much part of its brand heritage as St James’s Gate, but how does the brand’s more recent advertising measure up against the glory years? Not very well, according to Conor Kennedy, creative director at advertising agency Javelin.
“Successive waves of Guinness advertising of late seem like extravagant exercises in hollow bombast that could be signed off by any of a range of large brands trading in anything from ambitiously priced sneakers to near-miraculous cosmetics.
“These days the human warmth is missing. A good Guinness commercial should be about affection, fellowship and knowing what’s what. The current office block execution offers no trace of any of this.”
Colin Murphy, creative director in ad agency Owens DDB, believes that every decade has produced its share of classic Guinness ads, as well as a few duds.
He singles out the Big Pintcampaign in the 1990s as being particularly naff.
“If memory serves me right, the account had moved to the UK and we were rewarded with a campaign replete with Paddywhackery, low production values and scripts utterly devoid of humour.
“How somebody actually approved these without realising some of them were actually offensive still amazes me.
"However, for the most part, my memory of Guinness advertising through the years is a good one. Tá siad ag teachtwas ahead of its time when it first came out and 30 years later, I can actually remember seeing it for the first time in the Savoy cinema.
“The entire concept worked perfectly in terms of the product, and seen in the context of other advertising from the 1970s, the ad was truly a masterpiece.”
Murphy’s view is that the hallmark of the great Guinness ads is simplicity.
“Think of the famous ones: a camera pans slowly down a pint for 30 seconds; a currach delivers a barrel of Guinness to thirsty islanders; the settling pint is contrasted with spectacular surfing waves. These are exceedingly simple concepts.”
Apart from the nostalgia clips, the main Guinness commercial currently airing is the one where hundreds of people light up an office block.
Will this ad get a retrospective airing when Guinness gets to 300?
Laurence Keogh, creative director in ad agency McConnells, notes that advertising has to reflect the age, to pick up on current fashions and mores and give them a commercial spin.
“The huge lit-up building-as- pint is doing an excellent job of this,” he said. “It’s picking up on YouTube-driven trends in culture towards self-produced work and interaction and is therefore very ‘now’.”
In Keogh’s opinion, a touch of magic realism is an essential ingredient in great Guinness ads.
“It’s why the Christmas ad (“Even at the home of the black stuff, we dream of a white one”) is so beautifully in tune with the world of Guinness,” he says.
“I think this ad sums up a certain feeling that, in some ways, Guinness is that thing which represents all that is best about Ireland.”
Warming to his subject, Keogh expands on this theme. “Let’s go further: is Guinness not in some way an idealised version of what Ireland could have been, had nationalism proceeded in a different direction?
“As we enter a recession, why not imagine Ireland as Guinness in its massively moneyed heyday. It’s not Catholic or republican, but it does have a great looking navy, resplendent in blue and cream (the Lady Patricia) and its own empire (England, Nigeria).
“It’s an Ireland which has its aristocratic logo (a harp), is philanthropic and enjoys grouse shooting at weekends.”
Perhaps inspired by a pitch he might have made for the stout account, Keogh goes on: “The tale of the Irish brewers who metamorphosed into English aristocrats has a fairytale quality to it. It is a fantasy come true, just as the Joycean idea of snow being ‘general all over Ireland’ comes true in the Christmas ad.
“All good Guinness ads share this quality of fantasy realised: magic happening before one’s eyes; dream logic and wish- fulfilment; waves that turn into horses. A good Guinness ad is a pretty tall order, because it must forge in the smithy of its soul the uncreated consciousness of a nation – a nicer one.”
