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October 8, 2005

Now That's What I Call "Intelligent Design"

Guinness beer has a new TV commercial that's got the Internets all abuzz.

Titled "noitulovE", the ad presents evolution backwards. (Hint: re-read the title.) Starting with three well-satisfied pub-goers enjoying their first sip of Guinness, the ad then starts moving backward through the "evolution" of the human race. (As PZ Myers points out at Pharyngula, the evolutionary chain presented in the TV spot features some pretty massive errors. Pretty errors, but inaccuracies nonetheless.)

The visuals are stunning, the sountrack is ultra-hip (Sammy Davis Junior swings "The Rhythm of Life" from the musical "Sweet Charity"), and the punch-line of the ad is that Guinness is the pinnacle of human evolution. Not bad for a 50-second spot.

Now, if you know me then you know that I firmly believe that Guinness (much more so than Campbells dehydrated soup-like substance) is good food. But there's something else I'd like to discuss briefly about this ad -- the closing tag-line: "Good things come to those who wait." This is not ground-breaking. It's hackneyed and clicheed, and even Abraham Lincoln is reported to have riffed on it.*

What I'm more interested in is the interplay between the commonplace saying itself, the font it is rendered in, the glasses beneath it, and the placement of the Guinness logo. If you're in my Digital Composing class, you'll recognize this as an interesting play between the visual and the verbal.

1) The three glasses are staggered, with the farthest away from the camera being the most recently poured. The next closest glass has obviously sat for a few seconds, and the glass closest to us is ready to drink, its carbonation and fizziness subsided to a nice, creamy head. Thus, we have the passage of time reresented not by successive images, but through the distance between the objects in a single shot and the viewer.

2) Only the closest glass (the one that is ready to drink) is in a glass marked with the Guinness logo. It is as if the drink needed time to mature, and is now fully ripe, fully capable of being called Guinness.

3) The harp in the Guinness logo is the same shade as the fizziness in the other two glasses, calling your attention back to the famously sudsy effect of freshly-poured Guinness.

4) The tag-line is written in no-nonsense sans-serif font. It makes a clear, unambiguous statement, one that is emphasized by the period at the end. Yes, we understand the meaning of the phrase and agree with it because we're seeing, right now, the good thing that will come to us after we are forced to wait at the bar for our pint.

Most advertisements make the same point: buy this product because it will make you happy. It is the specifics of how the product will make you happy that produce most of the differences between commercials. In this commercial, we get in the last four seconds (less than 10% of the entire ad) the message that the meaning behind your entire existence has been to order and enjoy Guinness and that waiting the 50 seconds or so it takes for your beer to stop fizzing is the same thing as 500,000,000 years of evolution. Those are some pretty heavy signals to be sending in four seconds.

Well done, AMV BBDO!

For more on the making of the ad, check this out.

* Lincoln's apochryphal-sounding interpretation reads, "Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left over by those who hustle."

Posted by reparent at October 8, 2005 1:45 PM

Comments

Posted by: Interface Dominatrix at October 11, 2005 10:06 PM