Dive Brief:

• Diageo-owned Guinness launched a new Lucky Sundays program to celebrate every Sunday leading up to St. Patrick’s Day, per a press release. The campaign is a playful nod to this year’s holiday falling on a Sunday, March 17.
• Lucky Sundays includes a slew of activations that can be accessed via a landing page and a Guinness Together augmented reality (AR) experience. The Irish dry stout brand will also be visiting select cities, including Cincinnati, Ohio, Charleston, South Carolina and Brooklyn, New York. 
• Guinness also teamed with family history tracker Ancestry to allow consumers to track their connections to the famous Guinness Storehouse via digitized records. The Lucky Sundays program kicked off on Feb. 18 with a tie-up with football icon Joe Montana for a charitable event in Baltimore.

Dive Insight:

Guinness is enacting an expansive St. Paddy’s Day playbook with a Lucky Sundays program that nods to the holiday falling on a Sunday this year. The program kicked off with a collaboration with football legend Montana, who participated in a Guinness Gives Back Community Service Event at the Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Baltimore last month.

The slate of events under Lucky Sundays will feature appearances from sports stars and celebrity chefs. As part of the program, Guinness will host the Irish Village celebration at Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Baltimore the weekend of March 9 and the entire weekend of St. Patrick’s Day. The brand will also appear at parades and festivities in New York City, Boston, Chicago and Savannah, Georgia. 

Among other events is a Guinness Gives Back Service Event with Cincinnati Bengals star Joe Burrow in Cincinnati, Ohio, on March 3; a Lucky Sundays brunch with chef Dennis Prescott in Charleston, South Carolina, also on March 3; and another brunch with James Beard Award-winning chef Kwame Onwuachi in Brooklyn, New York on March 10. Guinness will also return as the official sponsor of the Chicago River dyeing and Chicago parade on March 16.

Guinness is sharing custom brunch recipes curated by Onwuachi and Prescott at Guinness Open Gate Breweries in Baltimore and Chicago, in addition to other participating bars. The marketer also teamed with alcoholic ice cream maker Tipsy Scoop for a limited-edition flavor. 

For consumers at home, Guinness will be hosting weekly giveaways on social media. Fans can get in on the action via an AR experience on the Lucky Sundays landing page, allowing them to digitally place a pint of Guinness in a location of their choosing and share the image, a move that could drum up additional online exposure. 

In addition, consumers can access a partnership between Guinness and Ancestry to explore their connection with the brand, a move that was achieved by digitizing 1.4 million records from the Guinness Storehouse archive. Included in the records are details regarding St James Gate Brewery employees such as home addresses, occupations, how much money they made, leaves of absence and more, per details shared with Marketing Dive. The collection includes dates ranging from 1799 to 1939, when Guinness was the largest private-sector employer in Ireland. Access to the digitized records will be made available starting March 8.

With 31.5 million people of Irish descent living in America, St. Patrick’s Day serves as a time where brands can lean into consumers’ desire to learn more about their heritage. Guinness, one of the most well-known Irish brands globally, serves as a connecting point for many back to the region. The Lucky Sundays program along with the Ancestry collaboration allows for all consumers to participate, whether they live near a Storehouse or not.

St. Paddy’s Day is a popular time for Irish brands to make their mark in the U.S. Jameson, owned by Pernod Ricard, also centered its celebrations around the holiday falling on a Sunday. However, unlike Guinness, Jameson took a more anti-Sunday approach, encouraging consumers to celebrate the holiday on Saturday.