No brand has a deeper bench of great advertising, and the sales line from Surfer to Britain's best-selling pub pint is as clean as the category gets.
Guinness has spent more than 30 years telling people to wait for a drink, and they have thanked it by making it the best-selling beer in British pubs. No brand has a deeper bench of great advertising: a 1999 surfer that still tops best-ever polls, an evolution run backwards that took the Cannes Grand Prix, a man dancing round a settling pint who sent a 1950s mambo to number two in the charts. This is our ranking of the ten Guinness adverts that matter, from the 2025 Premier League films back to the one that made Jonathan Glazer’s name.
The criteria are the same ones we apply to everything on Ad Ranking. Was there a sharp idea a stranger could repeat, and was the craft good enough to be studied? Did the brand risk something? Did a number move, and did the work have legs beyond its launch flight?
Guinness scores highly on all five across its body of work, which is why this list runs to ten and could have run to twenty. Entries run from ten down to one, each with a Crown verdict.
Agency: TBWA Ireland. First aired: 1 December 2004.
Snow falls on the Custom House in Dublin, Shandon Bells in Cork, the Claddagh in Galway and J O’Connell’s pub in Meath, and the line “Don’t forget to turn the lights out” closes it. The Irish Examiner listed it among the classic Christmas commercials again in November 2025, more than two decades after its debut, which is the point. Guinness has never replaced it, only re-run it, and Irish audiences now treat its first airing as the start of the season. It is not a piece of great filmmaking.
It is a piece of great brand management: a cheap-to-run, impossible-to-copy asset that earns a fresh wave of affection every year.
Crown verdict: the most valuable Christmas ad in Ireland and the least effort ever spent to keep one alive.
Agency: AMV BBDO. Creatives: Will Brookwell and Louis Prenaud. Launched 15 August 2025 during Sky Sports’ coverage of Liverpool against Bournemouth, the opening fixture of the 2025/26 season.
A 90-second film built from real fans of all 20 Premier League clubs, set to “All My Friends” by the Everton-supporting producer Barry Can’t Swim, with a media plan of at least 215 live games on Sky and NBC. Creative Salon reported it as the global launch of the “Lovely Days” platform, which the brand has since extended into the Six Nations with Born Social’s “Pints of View” beer mats in February 2026 and into Africa and Asia with VML UK’s “Guinness Extra” film in March 2026. The casting of real people is the craft; the ambition of the platform is the story.
Crown verdict: the current platform, well made and already travelling, but still waiting for its Surfer.
Agency: AMV BBDO. Director: James Rouse through Biscuit. Creative directors: Nicholas Hulley and Nadja Lossgott. Launched September 2023 ahead of the Rugby World Cup, with Ireland the reigning Six Nations Grand Slam champions and their supporters terrified of saying so.
The film catches fans biting their tongues, touching wood and refusing to name the trophy, a national superstition rendered as comedy. Campaign called out how precisely it read the mood. Ireland lost to New Zealand in the quarter-final, which only made the ad look more prescient. As sponsorship advertising it is a model: no player endorsements, no highlights reel, just an observed truth about the people who buy the beer.
Crown verdict: the best rugby ad Guinness has made in a decade, and the only one that predicted the result.
Agency: AMV BBDO. Director: Chris Balmond through Outsider. Creative leads: Alex Grieve, Nadja Lossgott and Nicholas Hulley. Released as pubs reopened in April 2021, the film finds pints everywhere: a white cat asleep on a black bin, socks on a washing line, all cut to Elvis Presley’s “Always On My Mind”.
The payoff is the real thing, poured in a pub, with mates. It was charming, and it was also strategically exact. Guinness had put more than £30 million into hospitality during lockdown and needed a piece that made the return to the pub feel like the return of the brand. It gave the “Looks Like Guinness” idea a second life on social, where people have been posting accidental pints ever since.
Crown verdict: the pandemic ad that aged best, because it was about longing rather than lockdown.
Agency: AMV BBDO. Director: Henry-Alex Rubin. Launched 18 September 2017 as part of the Made of More series.
A 90-second documentary portrait of a group of Black riders in Compton, Los Angeles, who chose horses over gangs and keep rescued animals on small ranches in the middle of the city. The Drum made it Ad of the Day, and Guinness marketing director Duncan Elliott framed it as celebrating “a bold and unexpected choice”. It is the purest expression of what Made of More became after Sapeurs: find real people whose lives embody the brand’s idea of character, and get out of their way. The vertical cuts made for Facebook and Instagram were among the first serious attempts by a beer brand to shoot for the phone.
Crown verdict: proof the documentary formula could cross the Atlantic without losing its soul.
Agency: AMV BBDO. Director: Nicolai Fuglsig. Launched November 2007.
A village in the Argentine mountains sets off a domino run of 6,000 dominoes, 10,000 books, 400 tyres and a cast of 1,000 locals, ending in a tower of books that becomes a pint. Creative Review reported it as the most expensive Guinness ad ever made, at £10 million across the campaign. Fuglsig called it the hardest shoot of his career, and the point was the wait: the whole film is one long delay before the payoff, which is “Good things come to those who wait” rendered as engineering. It is the last of the great spectacle spots before Made of More turned the brand towards people.
Crown verdict: gloriously excessive, and the final flourish of the Glazer-era ambition before the strategy changed.
Agency: AMV BBDO. Director: Nicolai Fuglsig through MJZ and Stillking. Copywriter Nicholas Hulley, art director Nadja Lossgott, executive creative director Dave Buchanan. First aired in the UK on 15 January 2014, reported by Campaign Brief.
The film follows the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes of Brazzaville, working men who burn sugar cane by day and dress in tailored suits by night, to “What Makes a Good Man” by The Heavy. It is the ad that made Made of More mean something. The platform had launched in October 2012 with Peter Thwaites’s “Cloud” and needed a human subject; Sapeurs gave it one and defined the documentary style that followed. The IPA later credited the platform with a return of £4.81 for every £1 spent across 2012 to 2019.
Crown verdict: the ad that turned a slogan into a worldview, and the one every purpose-led brand film since has been trying to copy.
Agency: Arks, Dublin. Director: Richie Smyth through Littlebird Productions. Editor: Hugh Chaloner. First aired in Ireland on 18 May 1994 and in the UK in 1995.
Joe McKinney orders a pint and, while it settles, performs a jittery, jump-cut dance to Pérez Prado’s “Guaglione”, while the barman watches. There is no voiceover and the endline is “There’s no time like Guinness time”. The editing, achieved with a locked camera and hard cuts, was novel enough to prompt a copyright suit from the director Mehdi Norowzian, which Guinness won in 1998. The song went to number one in Ireland and number two in the UK, and The Drum credits the ad with a dance craze.
It is the origin of the entire “wait” idea that Surfer would later make mythic.
Crown verdict: the cheapest great Guinness ad, and the one that taught the brand that the pour, not the pint, is the product.
Agency: AMV BBDO. Creatives: Ian Heartfield and Matt Doman. Director: Daniel Kleinman through Kleinman Productions, with visual effects by Framestore CFC. Launched 3 October 2005 at a cost of £1.3 million within a £15 million campaign.
Three men take a sip in a London pub and then run backwards through evolution, from present-day men back through earlier hominids, apes and reptiles to mudskippers, the last of which pulls a face at the taste. Sammy Davis Jr’s “The Rhythm of Life” plays throughout. Ad Age reported the Cannes Film Grand Prix in 2006, the year it was also the Gunn Report’s most awarded commercial in the world. During the campaign Guinness reached a record 7.4 per cent UK value share while the beer market declined.
Crown verdict: the most complete 60 seconds in beer advertising, where the joke, the effects and the “wait” all land in the same frame.
Agency: AMV BBDO, with David Abbott as creative director, Tom Carty as copywriter and Walter Campbell as art director. Director: Jonathan Glazer through Academy, producer Nick Morris. First aired 17 March 1999 on a £6 million budget.
Shot in black and white in Hawaii over nine days, it follows a group of surfers waiting for the perfect wave while white horses break out of the surf, an image lifted from Walter Crane’s 1893 painting Neptune’s Horses. The narration borrows from Moby-Dick, “Here’s to you, Ahab”, and the sound is Leftfield’s “Phat Planet”. It won more awards than any other commercial in 1999 and in 2000 was voted the best ad of all time by Channel 4 and The Sunday Times, a title The Drum notes it has held in most polls since.
Crown verdict: the only ad on this list that is regularly discussed as a film, and the reason “Good things come to those who wait” is still the most famous line in British advertising.
The reason this list is possible is consistency. Guinness has had one agency, AMV BBDO, on its UK and Irish brand advertising for the entire period covered by entries one through nine, and it has run only two platforms across that time: “Good things come to those who wait” from 1994 and “Made of More” from 2012 until the Lovely Days platform took over. The IPA case study that won Gold and Best Multi-Market in 2020 valued the Made of More idea at £1 billion and found returns increasing year on year.
The commercial payoff is unusually visible. Diageo said in February 2023 that Guinness had overtaken Carling as the best-selling beer in British pubs. The Grocer‘s 2026 ranking of Britain’s biggest alcohol brands puts Guinness eighth, up from twelfth, at £259.2 million in retail sales and growing 8.3 per cent in a declining beer category, with Guinness 0.0 contributing £12.5 million of the gain.
Not many brands can draw a line from a 1999 surfer to a 2026 alcohol-free stout. Guinness can.
We scored each campaign on idea, craft, bravery, verified effectiveness and legs, then argued about the order. Surfer and noitulovE were never in doubt; both have the awards, the sales evidence and the cultural afterlife. Anticipation edges Sapeurs because it invented the brand’s central idea on an Irish production budget. Tipping Point ranks above the more admired Compton Cowboys for sheer nerve.
The 2025 and 2026 work sits lower because its results are not yet public, not because it is poor. We left out the Rutger Hauer “Pure Genius” years and Swimblack, which will annoy some readers, and the US snow-globe Christmas spot from 2024, which will annoy nobody. Verified facts only; where a credit could not be confirmed, it is not here.
He plans, buys and reviews advertising for a living, and helps score campaigns on the site against the same five Crown Score criteria alongside other authors and contributors.
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