A pint of Guinness and a packet of redundant ad executives, please

Will no-one rid of us this turbulent multinational corporation, Diageo, that owns Guinness? Here, courtesy of one of the sane parts of the Wall Street Journal, is their latest wheeze (subs. req'd). The headline promises

Guinness Warms To Vintage Ads For Newer Beer

and so one thinks: are they bringing back the classic ads like Guinness is Good For You, and the images of the man carrying a railway beam on his shoulder, and the beloved pelican? But read on and weep:

This summer, Diageo plans for the first time to dig into its advertising archive and to bring back some of its old TV ads to market Guinness Draught Extra Cold, a chillier version of its signature dark-brown beer...

It is looking at reviving a Guinness character from the 1990s -- a man who does a series of crazed, comical dances around a pint of Guinness in anticipation of his first sip...

The image of a cycling fish from the "Not Everything in Black and White Makes Sense" campaign that ran in the early 1990s also may return. In the ad, as Rodgers and Hammerstein's "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair" plays, Gloria Steinem's quip "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" is flashed before a giant fish gripping a bike's handlebars rides across the screen.

Where to begin? The 1990s is now "vintage" so what's going on here is more to do with tapping into the same audience demand that has made the BBC/VH1 decade review shows so popular. In this case what that means is that Guinness is staying with the genre of beer marketing that can't just stop telling us how downright wacky beer can be, complete with lame sitcom-style histronics and faux-absurdity in the ads. God be with the days when a product was pitched in terms of intrinsic characteristics.

But the biggest problem is that this is not an ad campaign for the original blackstuff, but the odious Guinness Extra Cold. Last year we brought to your attention the outrage that this glass of gullet-freezing shards of ice had brought to that fine barometer of Irish public opinion, the letters page of the Irish Times. The letters are sufficiently funny that we recommend you check it out again. If Diageo can dig up old ads, then we can certainly refer you to old posts.

Perhaps to end the week on a constructive note, let us suggest an alternative Guinness Extra Cold ad campaign for the suits at Diageo...we get OutKast to do just a slight reworking of the brilliant Hey Ya:

Andre "Extra Cold" 3000: What's cooler than being cool?
The Love Haters: Extra Cold!

UPDATE: The evil that Diageo does knows no bounds. They are increasing the price of a pint. The knockon effect of tax and a matching increase from pubs will be substantial.