Advertising the Black Stuff in Ireland 1959-1999

Dr Patricia Medcalf is a Lecturer in Advertising and Marketing at TU Dublin where she is course leader on the Bachelor degree programme in Advertising and Marketing Communications. She previously worked as Project Director with corporate and brand identity specialists Brand Union (formerly known as The Identity Business). Before that she was a marketing consultant with Siemens in Dublin and an account manager with Brann Direct Marketing in the UK. In 2004, she published the textbook, Marketing Communications: An Irish Perspective. Her PhD thesis analysed five decades of Guinness Advertising in Ireland. Recent publications in this area include a chapter in Patriomoine/Cultural Heritage in France and Ireland (2019).

« For most Irish people, Christmas really starts when the Guinness advertisements, from the home of the ‘black stuff’, appears on television with the haunting music and the imagery of snow-covered urban and rural scenes. Just as the product has become a synecdoche of Irishness, so the advertisements have become iconic signifiers of both the product and of a sense of Irishness. In this original and thought-provoking study, Trish Medcalf traces and analyses Guinness advertisements from 1959-1999. As well as looking at the advertisements themselves, she provides a telling critique of how they both responded to, and at times led, the changes in Irish society over that period.»(Eugene O’Brien, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick)

• Foreword by Patrick GuinnessIntroduction 1. 959–1969: New beginnings2. 1970–1979: Emerging voices 3. 1980–1989: Economic hardship 4. 1990–1999: A period of unprecedented changeConcluding thoughtsBibliographyIndex