TfL are certainly fickle when it comes to alcohol.
Last month it was Heineken but now it's Guinness.
Cheers?
The latest ad-splash is a week-long campaign for Guinness, specifically the new brewery experience in Covent Garden which the Kingopened just before Christmas. Two tube stations have had a makeover, one minimally and the other more map-based. And while one aspect of the campaign is creatively brilliant, overall it's just an expensive tourist attraction overselling itself.
Here's the clever bit.
Eleven Northern line maps at Tottenham Court Road station have been 'inverted' so the line is white and the background is black, thus resembling a pint of Guinness with a white frothy top. Where the stairwells meet the platform it looks like two pints side by side. Full marks to the creative team for that idea.
It can't be a coincidence that the TfL blog sprang into rare action yesterday with a post entitled Commercial Partnerships at TfL: A balancing act. It asserts that commercial income is an essential part of TfL's wider strategy to grow and diversify revenue. It recognises they haven't always got it right ("Following the Burberry activation at Bond Street, which created some unintentional customer confusion, we reviewed and improved our approach"). And it lists three guiding qualities every time an activation like this goes live. Only one is a positive - raising money - whereas the other two are essentially 'we promise not to muck up'.
• Revenue generation – aiming to infuse colour and fun into the network while generating essential income
• Customer clarity – carrying out essential planning to ensure no customer is ever confused or misdirected
• Accessibility – embedded at every stage of planning and delivery, so no customer is disadvantaged
The inverted map is certainly accessible, indeed arguably clearer than the normal black on white. The only branding is a small harp beside the name of one station, assuming passengers will make the Guinness connection for themselves. Tellingly they've had to add a drinkware.co.uk URL at the bottom of the map, even at the bottom of the Central and Elizabeth line diagrams in the ticket hall, lest the tiny harp drive you to drink.
Yes they've changed someroundels, don't they always? Three on each platform have been swapped, a gold harp substituting for the red circle. Yes they've plastered a few corridors and slapped some Guinness ads up an escalator. Yes they've used black and gold along the top of the platform, though only partially. Yes there is a small toucan perched in the ticket hall, in fact two if you look carefully. No they haven't touched the Elizabeth line, not as far as I saw, because why waste extra money unnecessarily? And yes there is a large exhortation just before you leave the station to go and sample "The Home of Guinness in London", so I did.
And here's the stupid thing, Tottenham Court Road isn't the closest station to the Guinness Brewery. It isn't even the closest Northern line station, which is Leicester Square, but 95% of the marketing budget has still been spent here. The closest station is actually Covent Garden and all that has is half a dozen roundels - hardly any statement at all - but I guess the last thing TfL wants is more tourists at the deep awkward station with the busy lifts. Instead it's a 9 minute walk from Tottenham Court Road to the brewery, as the smallprint up the escalators attests, and that's assuming you know which convoluted way to go.
The Guinness Open Gate Brewery is an oddly-unfocused attraction tucked behind the streets of Covent Garden. It's partly based in historicbuildings around Old Brewery Yard but also sprawls along an access corridor to a separate piazza, filling whatever floors the developers could get their hands on. Guinness was never brewed here, despite what the heritage murals might hint, and indeed isn't brewed here now. Instead the on-site microbrewery team explore "the new frontier of beer flavours", "from classic cold lagers to innovative low-percentage brews and sours with a tropical twist", "brewed to bubble at the centre of your conversations". If you manage to find a bar where they sell proper Guinness, it's all shipped in from Ireland.
And they'd rather you didn't just come for a Guinness but were tempted by alternative purchases. The most prominent door leads to a restaurant where £14 gets you a sausage and £6 a side of chips, while a more expensive seafood restaurant lurks upstairs. A portentous stairwell leads to a basement events space available for hire. If you hang around the main yard after the tables have been set out a black van will sell you a bespoke pie with a smidgeon of Guinness in the gravy. Don't try looking for a pub, there is no pub, all the better to help pay off the £73m development costs.
A separate building, opposite where Stanford's map shop ended up, hosts the experiential part of the experience. Here you can book tours to view the non-Guinnesses being brewed, take part in a tasting session and in the final room try your hand at pulling the perfect pint. I imagine the finale is seriously Insta-friendly ("come on Jason, don't let it all froth up") and that drinking said pint occupies a fair proportion of the 90 minute tour duration. Meanwhile downstairs is a Guinness store specialising in merch rather than beer, should you genuinely have need of a branded umbrella, branded beermat, limited edition tank top or weird designer creation invented for the sake of it. The supposed must-have is a personalised glass with the engraving carried out on site by faux heritage staff wearing black and gold braces, and the whole place reeks of the fundamentally unnecessary.
I'm not averse to a Guinness souvenir, my fridge is bedecked with a tortoise magnet purchased 25 years ago at the St James's Gate Brewery in Dublin. But that felt like a proper tour whereas this is just windowdressing masquerading as heritage with a price tag to match, not so much celebrating a beer as pimping a brand. And that's also why Guinness have splashed themselves across a busy tube station this week, a siren call to the neo-proletariat to visit WC2 for an extended black and white experience. Londoners won't be getting lower tube fares as a result but some marketing executives will be very happy, and that's the only pure genius frothing up here.
