Good things come to those who wait
Encyclopedia
Advertising slogan
Advertising slogans are short, often memorable phrases used in advertising campaigns. They are claimed to be the most effective means of drawing attention to one or more aspects of a product. A strapline is a British term used as a secondary sentence attached to a brand name...
used by Diageo
Diageo
Diageo plc is a global alcoholic beverages company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's largest producer of spirits and a major producer of beer and wine....
in television, cinema, and print advertising campaign
Advertising campaign
An advertising campaign is a series of advertisement messages that share a single idea and theme which make up an integrated marketing communication...
s promoting Guinness
Guinness
Guinness is a popular Irish dry stout that originated in the brewery of Arthur Guinness at St. James's Gate, Dublin. Guinness is directly descended from the porter style that originated in London in the early 18th century and is one of the most successful beer brands worldwide, brewed in almost...
-brand draught
Draught beer
Draught beer is beer served from a cask or a pressurised keg.-History of draught:Until Joseph Bramah patented the beer engine in 1785, beer was served directly from the barrel and carried to the customer. The Old English word for carry was dragen which developed into a series of related words,...
stout
Stout
Stout is a dark beer made using roasted malt or barley, hops, water and yeast. Stouts were traditionally the generic term for the strongest or stoutest porters, typically 7% or 8%, produced by a brewery....
in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. The slogan formed the cornerstone of advertising agency
Advertising agency
An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services...
Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO
Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO
AMV BBDO is an advertising agency that works with over 85 brands, including BT, BlackBerry, Sainsbury’s, Aviva, Walkers and Mars. AMV identifies and addresses business challenges for its clients with integrated campaigns, incorporating digital, social, experiential, print or broadcast...
's successful pitch to secure the Guinness account in 1996. Their proposal was to turn around the negative consumer opinion of the length of time required to correctly pour a pint of Guinness from the tap, usually quoted as 119.5 seconds, as well as to encourage bartender
Bartender
A bartender is a person who serves beverages behind a counter in a bar, pub, tavern, or similar establishment. A bartender, in short, "tends the bar". The term barkeeper may carry a connotation of being the bar's owner...
s to take the time to do so. A similar idea had been incorporated into a number of Guinness campaigns in the past, such as the Irish
Republic of Ireland
Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...
"Guinness Time" television and cinema spots of the early 1990s.
The first piece of the "Good Things..." campaign to be launched was the sixty-second Swimblack
Swimblack
Swimblack is a 1998 advertisement for Guinness-brand draught stout broadcast in the United Kingdom. It is the first in the Good things come to those who wait advertising campaign created by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO who had won the Guinness account from Ogilvy & Mather in January 1998...
television and cinema commercial, in which an aging local sports hero annually swims in a race from an offshore buoy
Buoy
A buoy is a floating device that can have many different purposes. It can be anchored or allowed to drift. The word, of Old French or Middle Dutch origin, is now most commonly in UK English, although some orthoepists have traditionally prescribed the pronunciation...
to his brother's seafront pub
Public house
A public house, informally known as a pub, is a drinking establishment fundamental to the culture of Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. There are approximately 53,500 public houses in the United Kingdom. This number has been declining every year, so that nearly half of the smaller...
against the "clock" of pint of Guinness being correctly poured at the bar. The advertisement, which premiered on 16 May 1998, was successful at boosting sales, particularly among the older male demographic
Demographic profile
A demographic or demographic profile is a term used in marketing and broadcasting, to describe a demographic grouping or a market segment...
. The other major success of the campaign during its original four-year run was the critically acclaimed Surfer
Surfer (Guinness)
Surfer is a critically acclaimed integrated advertising campaign launched in 1999 by Diageo to promote Guinness-brand draught stout in the United Kingdom. The cornerstone of the campaign is a television commercial, originally 60 seconds long, which centred around a Polynesian surfer...
commercial released in 1999; a more serious black-and-white piece for television and cinema inspired by Walter Crane
Walter Crane
Walter Crane was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most prolific and influential children’s book creator of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of...
's 1892 painting Neptune's Horses. Surfer went on to be voted the "Best Ad of All Time" in a poll conducted by The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times is a British Sunday newspaper.The Sunday Times may also refer to:*The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times...
and Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
in 2002. After several other variations on the theme, including Bet on Black
Bet on Black
Bet on Black, occasionally referred to as "Snail Race", is an advertising campaign run in 2000 by Diageo to promote Guinness-brand stout in the United Kingdom. The piece, directed by Frank Budgen, follows a snail race taking place in a town of Latin American appearance...
and Dreamer
Dreamer (Guinness)
Dreamer is an integrated advertising campaign launched by Diageo in 2001 to promote Guinness-brand draught stout in the United Kingdom. It is the fourth piece of the Good things come to those who wait campaign, following on from Swimblack, Surfer, and Bet on Black...
, the campaign was put on the backburner. The primary motivation behind this was Diageo's decision to forgo regional advertising in the United Kingdom and Ireland in favour of pan-Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an campaigns, in the same manner as Guinness campaigns in North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
and the Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
n Michael Power
Michael Power (Guinness character)
Michael Power is an advertising character, the cornerstone of a large marketing campaign by the beer company Guinness to promote its products in Africa from 1999 to 2006. The character was played by Cleveland Mitchell, who was born in Jamaica and raised in Great Britain...
series. The "Good Things..." slogan proved difficult to translate, and so a decision was made to pursue other campaign ideas. Two of the more successful slogans tried out between 2000 and 2005 were "Believe" (Tom Crean, Free In, Volcano Rescue) and "A story of light and dark" (Moth, Mustang).
In 2005 Diageo made the decision to return to regional marketing campaigns. As such, Abbot Mead Vickers BBDO were presented with the choice of either coming up with a new slogan, or attempting to find a fresh take on "Good Things...". Feeling that none of the replacements that had been tried out in the intervening years had matched the appeal of Good Things..., the agency decided to attempt to find a new angle on their old concept. Several ideas were proposed, and the one believed to show the most promise was that of "The Longest Wait". After a basic script had been put together, the agency brought director Daniel Kleinman
Daniel Kleinman
Daniel Kleinman is a British television commercial and music video director who was title sequence designer for the James Bond series of films from 1995's GoldenEye until he was replaced by MK12 for 2008's Quantum of Solace....
on board. The result was commercial noitulovE
NoitulovE
noitulovE is a British television and cinema advertisement launched by Diageo in 2005 to promote Guinness draught stout. The 60-second piece formed the cornerstone of a £15 million advertising campaign targeting men in their late twenties and early thirties...
, which followed three Guinness patrons travelling backwards through time, "de-evolving" into a number of species along the way. The piece was a huge success both critically and financially: it received more awards than any other commercial in the world in 2006, and was credited with pushing Guinness into the position of market leader in the United Kingdom beer market.
Spurred on by this success, AMV BBDO produced several more "Good Things..." print and television commercials in 2006 and 2007, such as Hands and Fridge. The most recent item in the campaign is Tipping Point, Guinness' most expensive commercial to date, which premiered on British television on 13 November 2007.
External links
- Surfer on the Framestore CFCFramestore CFCFramestore is a British Oscar-winning visual effects company based near Oxford Street in London. Formed in 1986, it acquired the Computer Film Company in 1997. The company works across several different areas of the media: feature films, commercials, music videos, feature animation and digital.The...
website. - Dreamer on the Framestore CFC website.
- noitulovE on the GuinnessGuinnessGuinness is a popular Irish dry stout that originated in the brewery of Arthur Guinness at St. James's Gate, Dublin. Guinness is directly descended from the porter style that originated in London in the early 18th century and is one of the most successful beer brands worldwide, brewed in almost...
website. - Fridge on the Guinness website.
- Hands on the Guinness website.