Beale's Best In Show: Guinness (Irish International BBDO)
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Your support makes all the difference.Regular readers will remember that I wrote about a sexy fake viral showing a bottle of Guinness in the midst of a group sex session.
Guinness, as you might imagine, was rather annoyed about its brand being played with in this way. But hot on the heels of that bit of risqué user-generated content comes a new, legitimate campaign for the black stuff.
If you ask me, it's not necessarily better than the viral created by a mere punter. But at least you can watch this one with your granny. And though it's not as cheeky or fun, it's actually a very lovely piece of advertising. It's by the very respectable Dublin agency Irish International BBDO and it's as slick and plump-budgeted as you'd expect from a Guinness commercial.
The ad shows a swarm of office workers rushing through an office block, flicking light switches on and off in a frenzy. Then we see an outside shot of the building and realise that their light show is actually using the building to re-create a glass of Guinness, all velvety dark at the bottom and frothily white at the top.
It's cleverly done and underlines quite how iconic that image of a pint of Guinness has become. Mind you, there has been some chat on the adland blogs that the ad might get the green brigade up in arms. All those lights flickering away wasting electricity.
Except that the point of a pint of Guinness is its blackness, so most of the building is in darkness. Which makes a nice change from the average city nightscape, where so many buildings don't enforce a lights-off policy. So maybe the ad will also serve as an environmentally friendly reminder to switch off. Now that would be a fine example of an advertiser "doing something good".
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