At what point might you get rid of your beard? If even the advent of artfully unshaven Premier League footballers wasn’t enough to indicate looming saturation point, here’s a development that might give you pause. Guinness wants a piece of the action.
The company that has used everything from rampaging surf-horses to capering Inuits to punt its resolutely unchanging black gloop has gone to the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s got a new beer to sell but rather than devise some insanely tangential scenario involving twerking unicorns or something, the advertising could hardly be more self-consciously generic. It’s almost as if the last 20 years of gratuitously baroque brand-building has culminated in this: a tacit admission that smug, style-over-content gimmickry has led to complacency.
Accordingly, this advert is essentially a mea culpa thinly disguised as a carpe diem. We’re shown various studious and safety-goggled masters of brewing’s dark arts, hard at work on their latest project. They’re exploring, it’s suggested, the outer limits of what might be achievable by harnessing water, hops, barley and perhaps, just a dash of good old Guinness-patented craic.
And they’ve arrived at something visionary; a golden liquid with the word “ale” in its name. An earthy liquid, infused with integrity but handily marketable towards hirsute millennials with plenty of disposable income. They should probably have called it Guinness Artisan Ale, but even intuitive genius of this magnitude must rest occasionally. Now; where did I leave that razor?
