YouTube is great for finding old adverts, including this one from 1995 (I think) for Guinness, called ‘Anticipation’.
I remember it because I had it as a screensaver for a while. Back in the 1990s we didn’t have the internet at home, so I would have installed it from a cover-mounted CD-ROM from a computer magazine. I remember looking at the data files for the screensaver and finding that, rather than using video, it used a series of 256-colour bitmap images cobbled together – a bit like animated GIFs. The audio track was a separate Wave file. Consequently the animation wasn’t very good, but, then, that was computing in the 1990s for you. This was before the release of Windows 95 and therefore you had to install extra runtime software just to be able to play video files.
I have no idea if the screensaver would work on modern computers, and I doubt that the CD-ROM it came from would still be lying around at home anywhere.
The music that Guinness chose for the advert was a version of the Italian song called Guaglione, recorded by a Cuban musician Perez Prado in 1958. As a result of this advert’s popularity, the song was re-released as a single. It subsequently reached number 2 in the UK singles chart in May 1995, and number 1 in Ireland.
Of course, whilst I like the advert, I still don’t like the taste of Guinness. This is despite having a pint of it from the Guinness Storehouse when we went to Dublin last year. I like other porters and stouts but Guinness just doesn’t do it for me.
Anticipation originally appeared on Neil Turner's Blog and is released under a Creative Commons License. Follow me on Twitter - @nrturner
