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Client: Diageo
Product: Guinness
Title: Liberty Fields
Media: TV, Cinema, Online
Country: Japan & UK & Ireland
Date Of Campaign: August 2019

Background: Guinness has a long-standing tradition of supporting rugby and the values the brand and sport share: character, integrity and camaraderie. Interestingly another thing that they both share is an association with masculinity.

Idea: We wanted to challenge these tropes around rugby and our beer by using creativity as a force for good. And what better way to change perceptions of rugby, than the story of Liberty Fields – a group of courageous Japanese women who fought to pioneer women’s Rugby in Japan in the 1980s.

Results: Numbers are still coming in on the broader scale of the campaign’s impact upon the business, but initial results are incredibly promising. Firstly, the TVC’s creative impact scores and results were highly encouraging. The film performed significantly higher than the norm for all of engagement, brand distinctiveness, creative distinctiveness and brand recall. With regards direct impact on the success of the business, the cultural context is important. Liberty Fields launched and ran during the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan. Whilst Guinness has an historically strong association with the sport, it’s not an official sponsor of the tournament. This inhibits the brand massively when it comes to how it communicates and means that Guinness were unable to directly make reference to the tournament through anything they produced. But in spite of these parameters, not only was the brand prevalent and proactive throughout the competition, it even managed to come out as the most attributed brand to rugby off the back of the World Cup. This was made all the more sweet, because Guinness beat out a number of other official brands, including category competitor Heineken. Guinness then backed that up by grabbing top spot for the period as both GB and Ireland’s most popular beer brand.But perhaps most importantly, from a business perspective, was the effect that the campaign had on product volume: Guinness sold a massive, incremental 2.6 million pints during the same period year on year.