How good was it for Guinness?

QUEEN ELIZABETH gazed at it in fascination. Prince Philip asked whether it was made with Liffey water. And the US president reportedly downed it in four mouthfuls and talked about how it tastes better in Ireland.

It was a marketeer’s dream week for Guinness. The visit to the Gravity Bar at the Storehouse by their royal highnesses may have ended without a drop taken, but the image of the Queen appraising the pint was perfect product placement, as close to a royal warrant as could be hoped for. In the US, it quickly led to a cheeky parody seen by millions of viewers of Jay Leno’s Tonight Show. In this version, which has gone viral online, the head of the Commonwealth and supreme governor of the Church of England was depicted leaving the “Guinness beer factory” two hours later, legless.

The Queen and Guinness in the same photograph might on its own have been a highlight of the year for Diageo Ireland and its UK overlords, but the best was yet to come.

Within days, the 44th president of the United States was seen first patiently waiting for his pint of Guinness to settle, then avidly finishing it as the first lady drank her half-pint glass. He didn’t just go through the motions either; he seemed to genuinely appreciate it and said he’d had one previously during a Shannon stopover. To the dismay of its US distributors, he even remarked that Ireland kept the best Guinness for itself.

Within hours the photograph of Barack Obama contentedly drinking his pint was the emblem of his visit, from the New York Times and Chicago Tribune to the Guardian and Le Figaro. The YouTube clip of Obama in Ollie Hayes’s pub in Moneygall has had more than 50,000 views. Google “Obama Guinness” and scores of pages appear in nearly as many languages. Tweets approved Obama’s pint-finishing prowess. It was posted on Facebook, mostly by emigrants brimming with pride and more than a little homesick yearning. You just know that tea towels and T-shirts will follow, while few US visitors this summer will return home without being asked if they had a pint of the black stuff while in Ireland.

So what is all this publicity worth to Diageo and to Guinness? To put it in context, the most expensive campaign for Guinness to date, in 2007, centred around a commercial called Tipping Point. In it, an Argentinian mountain village creates a giant domino effect that culminates in a tower of books revealed as a Guinness pint. Diageo reportedly spent a record £10 million (€11.5 million) on that campaign, about £2 million of which went on production. Few, though, will have an unprompted awareness of the advert, and it did little to arrest an overall decline in sales.

As far as the local market is concerned Obama and her majesty generated media time that would have cost well over €1 million. One American pundit estimates that the exposure internationally would have cost more than €150 million. Looking at the quantity and variety of images generated, and considering future repeats and value for the brand’s reputation, it’s hard to disagree. Some have even speculated that Diageo might cancel its above-the-line advertising – promotion using television, radio, print, web banners etc – for Guinness for the rest of 2011 on the basis that the brand’s visibility has peaked, and this is simply as good as it gets. That seems unlikely to happen, but it is hard to imagine anyone in Dublin or London feeling the need to increase awareness this year.

Between the Queen happily drinking it in and Obama happily drinking it down, May 2011 would seem to be win-win for Diageo and the Guinness brand. But no sooner had Obama exchanged stout and banter in Ireland for ping-pong and burgers in England than a third piece of news about Diageo was released from St James’s Gate. The corporation announced it is seeking 70 job cuts, mostly in support functions and marketing. Those 70 jobs represent about 5 per cent of Diageo’s workforce of 1,700 on the island. The figure chimes ominously with the 4 per cent net-sales decline in beer in Europe, of which, according to an earlier Diageo press release, Ireland is a key driver.

The jobs at Diageo are not all about Guinness. Diageo has eight “global priority” brands, and Guinness is the only beer brand among those top eight. But among Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, Baileys, Captain Morgan and the rest of the Diageo pantheon, there’s no doubt that Guinness is a significant player.

Ireland isn’t simply the heartland of Guinness but an important volume market, too, with one of every four pints of Guinness consumed here. For a brand like Guinness mature markets, where saturation has been achieved, don’t represent the future. Instead, some say they are cash cows that fund expansion in the markets of the future, namely Africa and Asia. Indeed, for some marketeers, a photograph of China’s president, Hu Jintao, skulling a pint of Guinness might have been the real Holy Grail.

Eoghan Nolan is an advertising creative director and the founder of Brand Artillery