The Guinness Toucan ("Just think what Toucan do")

Why it works

The bird that made a stout lovable. At the agency S.H. Benson, illustrator John Gilroy, inspired by watching a performing sea lion at the circus, began drawing animals with pints of Guinness, the start of a "My Goodness, My Guinness" menagerie that ran for decades. The toucan was the first to reach a poster, in 1935: it began as a pelican balancing seven pints under a comic rhyme, until the detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, then a Benson copywriter, changed it to a toucan with two glasses and the verse "If he can say as you can / Guinness is good for you / How grand to be a Toucan / Just think what Toucan do." It is studied as an early, perfect marriage of illustration and copy, in which pun, character and product cannot be pulled apart, and as the birth of a mascot: Campaign notes the toucan became almost as much a Guinness symbol as the harp. Gilroy drew the brand's ads for some thirty years.