Adverts may only last for seconds, but their omnipresence engrains them in our subconscious, allowing them to act as a sort of time machine, instantly transporting the viewer to the place and time where they were first encountered.
Guinness adverts loom large in popular culture; the company has a history of innovative and adventurous advertising concepts, enlisting famous names as creatives and providing big budgets to make mini feature films with high production values.
Over the last number of years the Guinness Archive has enlisted the expertise of the IFI Irish Film Archive, partnering to catalogue, digitise and preserve a large collection of 35mm and 16mm advertisements made between 1955 and 1995; a selection of which are now available on the IFI Archive Player. The project was inspired by the success of the IFI's Irish Adverts Project in 2016, with both possible thanks to support from Coimisiún na Meán’s Archiving Funding Scheme.
The commercials preserved within the scope of the Guinness project were created to advertise the black stuff to UK and Irish television audiences and the collection features a wealth of talent behind and in front of the camera, with directors including Alan Parker, Tony and Ridley Scott, music from artists like Elkie Brooks, Clannad and the Chieftains and well-known faces such as Pete Postlewaite, Bill Nighey, Robert Lindsay and Jon Pertwee appearing on screen.
The project was complex, taking several years to complete, and requiring the examination of multiple copies of hundreds of commercials in order to identify the best copies and document any differences between versions. The selected copies were then digitised and treated to improve their sound and picture for viewing purposes. Large digital files were catalogued and put through a specialist workflow, thus ensuring they could be preserved in the IFI Archive’s digital repository. From the hundreds of titles processed within the project, the Archive staff have now curated 85 of them for presentation on the IFI Archive Player - these have been categorised under different headings and by decade.
We expect this collection to be of huge interest to audiences, these adverts are not just a source of nostalgia , but also provide an insight into the culture and society from which they emerged. The topics they depict include changing representations of Irishness both at home and overseas, evolving gender roles, the ever transforming place of the pub in Irish society and shifting attitudes towards alcohol consumption.
While its difficult to pick standouts from such a diverse body of work featuring so many iconic commercials, the award-winning titles are probably the most notable. These have been helpfully grouped together on the IFI Archive player for ease of access; my personal favourite is the multi-award winning "Island", made in 1977 by Arks advertising and directed by John Devis.
This well-loved advert shows the inhabitants of a remote Irish speaking island, tensely awaiting the arrival of currachs transporting kegs of Guinness. The ambient sound of sea birds, a pub clock and oars hitting the waves helps to build the tension until we finally hear a phrase well known to Irish television audiences of the 1970s: "Ta siad ag Teacht"!
The Irish Adverts Project is now available on the IFI Archive player.
