GUINNESS POST-LOCKDOWN PINT

In Q1 2021, as the prospect of pubs reopening (again – but hopefully for good this time) began to become a reality, conversations turned to that “first pint” back in the pub.

Guinness is the draught brand with the greatest association with HOW it’s poured in a pub over any other brand.  Pubs reopening were a major boost as on-trade sales make up 70% of the brand’s UK sales. If pub-goers were heading back to the bar, we needed Guinness to be at the front of the queue ensuring Guinness was their “first pint.”  

As the old saying goes “Anticipation is the purest form of pleasure” and Guinness lovers had waited a LONG time to get back to drinking a bar-poured pint of the black stuff. And when you’re longing for something – whether it’s a loved one or your favourite pint – you find reminders of it everywhere.  

So, we used a creative and media platform where Guinness would appear everywhere you looked – #LookslikeGuinness. This strategy was named after the Guinness pouring technique:  

• Settle – making Guinness feel like it was everywhere, using personal and proximate media targeting  
• Surge – literally putting Guinness everywhere with national broadcast media.

Settle: The campaign launched with targeted social video that captured the sense of longing for a pint of Guinness with a series of ads that used the brand’s famous black and white pint iconography in everyday scenarios.  

We then took the personal approach into local areas with hand-picked OOH ads that specifically referenced the location of local pubs in the run up to re-opening day. 

Surge: In activating the final national ‘Surge’ element of our plan we deployed a week’s worth of high impact, high engagement activity, including an emotional 40 second “Welcome Back” commercial which ran across TV and social and a national press campaign within titles such as The Guardian, The Metro, and The Sun.

Overall, the campaign set out to do what it was meant to, with our multi-channel approach a raging success. With the perfect blend of traditional (OOH, TV, Print) and modern advertising (Online, Social), we made sure that Guinness would be the “first pint” whilst stealing market share from our competitors. Cheers!