Guinness dancing man campaign (attempted) revival. Late 90s.

Hangdogroad · 12-10-2021 7:01am #1

Everyone of a certain age remembers that Guinness ad from 1995 with the guy dancing around his pint to the strains of Guagilone by Prez Prado. Something that seems to be totally forgotten, or at least no one I mention it to remembers it is that Guinness tried to repeat the success of this campaign circa 1998/99 and held open auditions for people to come and do their own wacky dance for a new ad inspired by the original.

The auditions were held in Dublin and filmed, the resultant ad included footage of people queuing up. I just remember seeing it a couple of times, both occasions I think in the cinema during the ads. It was pretty unimpressive TBH, just showed a load of plonkers prancing about and instead of Guigilone they used this piece with very annoying scat type vocals. I cant find the ad online or even any info, which is odd because it seemed to get a lot of press coverage on the run up to it.

Peregrinus · 12-10-2021 7:23am

"Anticipation" is the ad you're thinking of. The dancing man was played by Joe McKinney.

I've no recollection of the remake/follow-up that you mention (though I'm not doubting you). From what you say the later ad was nothing to write home about, which might explain why it got relatively little airtime and is not widely remembered. Over the years Guinness produced an awful lot of very good and very memorable advertising, so if this was a bit of a dud neither they nor anyone else involved with it will have any particular reason to remember it or promote it years later.

You say that the production of the remake got a lot of press coverage at the time, and it's possible that that was actually the point of the exercise — the finished product may have been of no interest to them and it may not have fitted in with Guinness's broadcast/cinema advertising strategy and themes in 1998/99 (they were well into the "Black and White" campaign by then). Maybe what they were really after was the local buzz around the production of the remake and, once they'd got that coverage, actually broadcasting the ad hardly mattered.