Brand
Guinness ads
Guinness's best ads, from the 1935 toucan to "Surfer" and "noitulovE": patient, crafted work built on the wait for a proper pint.
All ads
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2005noitulovE
Three drinkers raise their pints — and time reverses.
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1999Michael Power
Michael Power, an impeccably dressed action hero of no specified African nationality, foils villains and saves the day in mini-adventures several…
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1999Surfer
A beer's pour time turned into myth.
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1955The Guinness Book of Records
A pub-argument settler that became one of the best-selling books in history.
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1935The Guinness Toucan ("Just think what Toucan do")
The bird that made a stout lovable.
Guinness’s advertising
Patience runs through Guinness's advertising, in its most famous line and in how long its ideas last. At S.H. Benson in 1935, John Gilroy's drawing and Dorothy L. Sayers's verse produced the Guinness toucan, part of a menagerie of animals that ran for decades and a mascot that became almost as much a symbol of the brand as the harp.
In 1955 the brewery made something even longer-lived. The Guinness Book of Records began as a promotional giveaway for pubs, meant to settle the arguments fought nightly over pints, and grew into one of the best-selling books in history.
Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO turned a product drawback into the brand's personality: a proper pint takes time to settle, so the line became "Good things come to those who wait". Surfer dramatised the wait with a surfer and a wave that erupts into white horses, and it was voted the best ad of all time in a Channel 4 and Sunday Times poll. noitulovE reinvented the same idea rather than repeating it, running evolution backwards to show a pint 500 million years in the making, and won the Film Grand Prix at Cannes.
In Africa the brand took another route. Saatchi & Saatchi's Michael Power was an action hero whose mini-adventures ended with a Guinness, and he became famous enough to star in a feature film financed by the brand.