Spotlight on Guinness x Premier League Football

Client: Diageo

Brands: Guinness

Sponsorship Assets: Premier League

What was the client's problem?

In June 2024, Diageo signed a deal with the Premier League to make Guinness the league’s beer partner for four years. The biggest problem was that the deal was agreed just 100 days before the season started. Guinness had no plans, no ads, and seemingly no way of bringing the partnership to life in the On Premise in time.

What were they looking for?

A digital partner that could take the new sponsorship and do three things:

• Support customer pubs and bars by driving incremental foot traffic at scale
• Build association of Guinness and football to attract new drinkers
• Increase rate of sale during Premier League matches in the On Premise

What concerns did we need to overcome?

Timelines, global scale, and local relevance. Could we deliver something in time and would it work across multiple global markets at scale?

What operational challenges did we need to consider?

Guinness is licensed to 3rd party brewers in multiple markets (e.g. Kronenbourg in France, or Lion in Australia). While Guinness had a long track record of working with FANZO in GB and Ireland, we would need to bring other partners (who had their own ways of doing things) on the journey.

There was also no time for new processes with commercial teams so anything we did had to be done without requiring hours-long briefings and dedicated time from key account managers and sales reps.

Finally, anything we did needed to fit not just with Guinness’ objectives but also the Premier League’s agenda and guidelines.

What was our solution?

A tailored approach that took advantage of tried and tested FANZO technology in ways that made sense to relevant markets.

Bar Finder

FANZO is the most used bar finder for sports fans in the world so the simple first step was to feature as many Guinness venues showing Premier League as possible. We worked with Diageo to identify more than 15,000 top quality venues from London to Lyon and from Dublin to Darwin where fans could enjoy Premier League football with a pint of Guinness in hand. These bars were then promoted across FANZO’s website, email, push notifications, and Guinness’ social channels to drive footfall and build association.

In Venue Gamification

With limited time to launch a mechanic that would bring Premier League football to life in venues using Guinness’ sponsorship we converted an extremely popular Spin to Win game that Guinness had used to activate the Guinness Six Nations in Ireland.

Fans could check into any participating pub for the chance to win tickets, merch, a pint of Guinness or even a 0.0. FANZO was responsible for briefing participating venues and for working with Guinness’ sponsorship agency, Wasserman, to fulfill prizes.

Digital Vouchering

Using FANZO’s unique mobile vouchering solution, we were able to offer complimentary pints of Guinness to football fans in a variety of ways to suit local preferences, legislation, and budgets. For example:

• In Ireland, where FANZO and Guinness had already built up significant scale in drinks activations, we were able to offer pints as prizes in more than 1,500 participating venues.
• In Australia, where lottery games involving alcohol are prohibited in certain states, any football fan playing Guinness’ Spin to Win game automatically earned themselves a 2 for 1 Guinness voucher while also being entered into a prize draw for tickets.
• In France, where any advertising linking alcohol and sport is illegal, we instead ran regular happy hour offers on FANZO for drinkers across 50 venues in key cities over France.

All of this activity - spanning multiple countries and continents - was delivered alongside Guinness’ partner agencies and with full approval of the Premier League.

Has it been successful?

A fantastic first year saw nearly 500,000 confirmed visits into Guinness pubs via the programme and resulted in double digit sales growth compared to control groups that also ran football activity but not involving FANZO. With more time to prepare for year 2, we’ve evolved the proposition further (including a fun new game called “Last Goal Wins”), while scaling the programme into more countries and more venues.