Case study: the Guinness ‘Surfer’ commercial
You can find this advertisement on the internet in both full-length and shortened forms, by
searching for ‘Guinness horse surfer ad’. The full-length version is available on YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcdDg30VBgo
This case study begins with a close textual analysis of a television advertisement first
shown in 1999, aiming to demonstrate how a semiotic and narrative analysis works in
practice. Because television commercials are short, but often take the form of a story told by
combinations of image, language and sound, they function well as demonstration pieces for
textual analysis. But the later parts of this case study raise some questions about alternative
ways of understanding this commercial. Information about the production of the ad, its
historical and commercial context and the intentions of its makers both support and challenge
the conclusions of a close textual analysis. So, as well as showing the power of textual
analysis itself, this case study aims to draw attention to the exclusions and blind spots that it
involves.
The narrative of the ad can be divided into four segments. First, the surfers wait on the
beach, then they ride a huge wave, next they celebrate together and finally an image of a pint
of Guinness is connected with this narrative of expectation and fulfilment. The first three
segments of the narrative unfold in chronological order, as a story, while the final segment
reflects back over the narrative as a whole.
The ad opens in black and white with an unusually long close-up of a man’s face,
with a brief male voice-over and no music. The stillness of the face and the man’s upward
gaze fit with the narration’s words about the experience of waiting and wanting. The image
and the narration work together to set up a narrative structure based on anticipation and
desire, which invites the viewer to wonder what the man is waiting for. They begin a story.
The camera’s point of view reverses, to show surfers entering the water with their
surfboards. The wider shots establish a hot foreign location, the beach and the large waves
coming on to the shore. Shot length becomes shorter, the camera is hand-held and mobile,
speeding up the narrative rhythm of the sequence. The narration continues to elaborate the
waiting motif, using repetition of the words ‘tick’ and ‘tock’ to match the duration of the wait
with the duration of a repeated structure of words associated with measuring time. The
pounding music connotes the rapid heartbeat associated with excitement and danger, its
alternating beats linking with the alternating ‘tick’ and ‘tock’ of the voice-over. The sequence
increases the momentum of the narrative and suggests that what the surfers are waiting for is
about to arrive.
A static long shot from above the beach shows a huge wave approaching, its white top
contrasting with the dark water and tiny surfers standing in front of it. The surfers mount their
surfboards and move into the wave. We hear the narrator say: ‘Ahab says “I don’t care who
you are, here’s to your dream”.’ The narration links the visual action to the motif of waiting
and wanting with the sign ‘dream’, and introduces Ahab without explaining who he is,
though he appears to be situated in a bar making a toast to ‘your dream’. The music
continues, becoming louder and more fully orchestrated. The ‘dream’ for which the surfers
have been waiting becomes more clearly established as the opportunity to ride this huge
wave. Camera shots become even shorter, and point of view shifts between close-ups of the
surfer’s face amid the wave, medium shots from the side as he rides the wave and long shots
showing several surfers. Many of these shots include large white horses seeming to emerge
from the wave, plunging from its top into the space occupied by the surfers. The narration
continues to elaborate a scene in a bar, involving ‘sailors’ toasting Ahab accompanied by a
‘drummer’. The narrator exhales, as if having drunk a large gulp. The bar-room scene links
with the celebration of a ‘dream’ and a quest to accomplish something shared by the ‘sailors’
and ‘Ahab’, just as the surfers share the experience of riding their dream wave.
The rapid alternation of camera shots ceases, replaced by a still shot of the surfer
raising his arms in exultation. The music stops, and there is no narration. The surfing
experience, and the narrator’s bar-room toast narrative, seem to have been completed. Handheld camera shots follow the surfers back to the shore, and provide different points of view
on the group as they collapse on to the sand celebrating and hugging each other. The
narration reintroduces the toasting motif, connecting the surfers’ celebration with the barroom scene involving the sailors, Ahab and the drummer. The two narratives are parallel to
each other.
The advertisement ends with a still front-on shot of a pint of Guinness. It shares its
static quality and positioning with the opening shot of the surfer’s face, creating a cyclical
resolution to the advertisement. The black beer and its white foaming head connect with the
dark water, white surf and white horses of the earlier sequences. The drink of beer connects
with the toasting motif and bar-room scene in the voice-over. The written signs ‘good things’
and ‘wait’ connect with the anticipation of the ‘dream’ and the surfers’ waiting at the start of
the advertisement. The pint of Guinness appears to be equivalent to, or to contain, the various
meanings of the action and narration in the commercial as a whole.
A close textual analysis of this ad shows that its meanings are developed through
metonymies and metaphors. White rolling surf, white plunging horses and white bubbling
Guinness share traits of whiteness which link them together, so they are metonymies for each
other. Waiting for an exciting surfing experience is parallel to waiting for a delicious drink,
so although these are different experiences they are metaphors for each other. The semiotic
structure of the ad enables it to correlate seemingly different contents with each other, so they
apparently share similar meanings. The exotic, dangerous, masculine achievements of the
surfers are correlated with the Guinness brand, giving this product meanings that are attached
to it by the quite poetic and self-consciously artistic construction of the advertisement as a
narrative. This analysis of the commercial tried not to explain the constituents of the
advertisement except in the terms that the ad seems to offer unproblematically to its viewers,
but some of the ambiguities and puzzles can be explained by historical information,
production context and cultural associations. The close analysis of the advertisement is
unfinished without introducing some of these factors, which seem to belong outside the
commercial itself.
Guinness advertisements appeared first in newspapers in 1929 with the original
slogan ‘Guinness is good for you’. Advertisements then drew either on variations of this
slogan (‘Guinnless isn’t good for you’), on characteristics of the beer (‘Tall dark and have
some’, ‘Not everything in black and white makes sense’), or on the less specific slogan ‘Pure
Genius’. Incidentally, a Guinness commercial was one of the advertisements shown on the
first night of ITV in 1955. The ‘Surfer’ advertisement draws on some of this history. While it
does not say that Guinness is good for you, since this would now be an illegal claim that
would get the company into trouble, it does associate the product with the vigorous outdoor
activity of surfing. It is shot in black and white, picking up on the colours of the product
itself, and some of its contents, like the Ahab references and bar-room toasting references,
seem at first glance not to make much sense. Certainly the white horses appearing in the
wave are non-realistic, and can be explained as representations of the surfer’s fantasies about
his experience.
The production of the advertisement began with Tom Carty and Walter Campbell of
the advertising agency Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO. They measured that it takes 120 seconds
to pour a pint of Guinness and leave it to settle for serving. The slogan ‘Good things come to
those who wait’ arose from a combination of the long waiting time when serving Guinness
and the old ‘good for you’ slogan. They had created an earlier commercial about an elderly
Italian swimmer who crosses a harbour in the time taken to pour a pint, and the sea
connections and waiting time in ‘Surfer’ sought to connect the advertisement with its
predecessor. But they were cautious about the connections between surfing and a vintage Old
Spice aftershave advertisement (1977) featuring a surfer, widely regarded as outdated and
naff. Carty and Campbell enriched the surfing motif with references to the climactic sea
sequences in the film Moby Dick, where the whaler Captain Ahab obsessively pursues a
gigantic white whale, and a painting by Walter Crane that shows white horses mingling with
waves. The advertisement cost about £1 million to make, and its aim was to position
Guinness as a sophisticated drink for younger drinkers. So the production context of the
commercial reveals an awareness of the history of Guinness advertising, an attempt to draw
on notions of obsession, risk and a history of sea adventure fiction, together with a target
market of youthful drinkers who might be expected to respond to its complex narrative
structure, and the aspirational theme of the ‘dream’ of excitement and physical prowess.
The ‘Surfer’ ad is in some ways representative of television narrative, especially in
advertisements. It uses dramatic codes of narrative structure, music and visual effects which
could be found in many other advertisements and television fiction programmes. But it is also
unrepresentative, partly because it gained widespread public recognition, and partly because
it is longer, more expensive to produce and more self-consciously artistic than many
commercials. By the age of thirty-five, the average person has seen 150,000 television
commercials, amounting to about 75,000 minutes or two months. In this context, an
advertisement that makes a public impact is both unusual and very valuable to the market
presence of the product it advertises. The ‘Surfer’ commercial was the most-voted-for
advertisement in Channel 4’s poll of 2000 to select viewers’ 100 Greatest TV Ads. There
were 10,000 votes cast in the poll, and the Bank Holiday Monday screening of 100 Greatest
TV Ads drew four million viewers. The final point to make in the context of this case study,
therefore, is to note that this advertisement and the production context and history behind it
are unusually accessible compared to the great majority of unremarked and poorly
remembered commercials alongside it. A close textual analysis of its narrative is a special
form of attention to the making of meanings in television that sets the procedures of
Television Studies apart from the more usual kinds of attention that television receives from
its viewers.