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Guinness Liberty Fields Backs Women's Rugby With Untold Grit
Guinness launched Liberty Fields in the United Kingdom in August 2019, a documentary-style film campaign created by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO that tells the true story of Liberty Fields RFC, an all-women rugby club that became Japan's first international women's rugby squad in the 1980s, competing without a coach, a doctor, or any institutional support.
The campaign sits within Guinness's long-running Made of More creative platform, a framework that consistently locates individuals and collectives who demonstrate extraordinary resolve. Liberty Fields extends that lineage into women's sport, arriving at a moment of heightened cultural relevance: the 2019 Rugby World Cup was scheduled to take place in Japan, giving the historical narrative immediate contemporary resonance. The campaign exists in two primary formats — a 60-second television commercial and a five-minute documentary — alongside social media activation, an ITV special, and venue takeovers across the United Kingdom, according to records held at Clapboard.com. The women's squad featured in Liberty Fields first came together in 1989, a fact that grounds the storytelling in verifiable history rather than constructed sentiment. Production partners on the campaign included Stink Films, Mr+Positive Tokyo, post-production house Untold, music supervisor Radford Music, and media agency Carat, each contributing a distinct layer to the campaign's considerable technical and editorial ambition. Liam Gallagher was named as an associated person on the project, connecting the campaign to a broader cultural moment in the United Kingdom that extended beyond sport alone. The Clapboard Score for Liberty Fields is 72 out of 100, reflecting strong creative craft and cultural coherence alongside the absence of publicly verified performance metrics.
Guinness occupies a distinctive position in the United Kingdom alcoholic drinks market, one built as much on cultural association as on product heritage. The brand's parent company, Diageo plc, competes in a UK beer and stout category where rivals including Heineken and Anheuser-Busch — which held approximately 27% of global beer market share according to Scribd's documented industry research — invest heavily in mainstream sports sponsorship, particularly football and premium rugby properties. Against that backdrop, Guinness's decision to anchor Liberty Fields in women's rugby history represents a deliberate act of differentiation rather than scale.
The strategic insight driving Liberty Fields connects to a durable truth about sports fandom in the United Kingdom: audiences increasingly value stories of perseverance over stories of victory. The campaign targets sports enthusiasts who measure authenticity not by a brand's stadium presence but by its willingness to surface narratives that official histories have overlooked. In the United Kingdom, the timing was precise. The Advertising Standards Authority has documented a sustained shift in how UK audiences respond to gender-progressive advertising in sport, and Liberty Fields arrives at the inflection point of that cultural movement. The Made of More platform, through which AMV BBDO had managed Guinness's creative output since taking the account from Ogilvy and Mather in 1998 — a relationship spanning approximately 21 years by the time Liberty Fields launched — provided the strategic scaffolding for a story about a team that succeeded on pure collective will. The rugby setting also activates Guinness's authentic and long-standing association with the sport across the United Kingdom and Ireland, a connection that competing lager brands cannot credibly replicate, reinforcing why the category play here is emotional territory rather than media weight.
Eliot Rausch directed Liberty Fields for Guinness, working through production company Stink Films with post-production delivered by Untold, according to credits documented at Clapboard.com and corroborated by Ads of the World. Rausch's documentary sensibility — built across a body of work that foregrounds human dignity in constrained circumstances — made him a precise creative match for a story about women who played international rugby without institutional scaffolding.
Creative direction on the campaign was shared by Nick Hulley and Nadja Lossgott at AMV BBDO, with copywriting by Alex Grieve and art direction by Adrian Rossi. The planning team comprised David Edwards, Lisa Stoney, and Alaina Crystal, while agency production was managed by Nick Godden and Frankie Burwell-Wright. That concentration of named senior talent on a single campaign reflects the ambition AMV BBDO placed behind Liberty Fields within the United Kingdom market. The five-minute documentary format is itself a strategic creative choice: it resists the compression that conventional advertising imposes, allowing the women of Liberty Fields RFC to speak at the pace their story demands rather than at the pace a media schedule permits. The 60-second television edit distils that material for broadcast audiences across the United Kingdom without sacrificing the emotional architecture of the longer piece. Music supervision was handled by Radford Music, with James Radford and Sam Ashwell selecting the track ANAANA by Cari, a choice that reinforces the campaign's cross-cultural texture — a Japanese women's story told for a British audience through a score that refuses simple nationalism. Mr+Positive Tokyo contributed to production, grounding the shoot in authentic Japanese geography and community context rather than constructed approximation, according to campaign records cited at Horizont.net.
No verified performance data for Liberty Fields is publicly available. No independently audited figures for viewership, brand uplift, purchase intent, or campaign reach have been confirmed by Diageo, AMV BBDO, or any named third-party measurement body in connection with this campaign. That absence does not diminish the analytical case for the work's effectiveness — it simply relocates the evidence from metrics to mechanics.
Structurally, Liberty Fields exhibits several characteristics associated with high-recall film advertising in the United Kingdom alcoholic drinks category. The dual-format architecture — 60-second broadcast film plus five-minute documentary — maximises both reach and depth, capturing audiences at different points of engagement and creating multiple entry points for organic sharing across platforms. The ITV special and venue takeover elements extend the campaign beyond paid media into earned and experiential territory, multiplying exposure without proportional cost, a model that the Institute of Advertising Standards in the UK has identified as a marker of integrated campaign efficiency, according to Ias Org Uk. The Made of More platform enjoys strong recognition among UK advertising industry observers, with prior executions in the same creative family — including the Sapeurs and Compton Cowboys films — having been documented as award-winning work by bodies including the Caples Awards, as noted by caples.org. Liberty Fields fits that lineage with precision. The campaign's association with the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan gave it a hard editorial deadline and a globally relevant news hook, structural conditions that the sponsorship effectiveness research published by Thesponsorshipeffect Substack identifies as amplifiers of campaign salience for sports-adjacent brands in the United Kingdom market.
Liberty Fields is a 2019 Guinness campaign created by AMV BBDO in the United Kingdom. It tells the true story of Liberty Fields RFC, Japan's first international women's rugby squad, who competed in the 1980s without a coach, doctor, or institutional support. The campaign was released in August 2019 to coincide with the Rugby World Cup in Japan.
Eliot Rausch directed Liberty Fields for Guinness through production company Stink Films. Post-production was handled by Untold. Rausch's documentary approach shaped both the five-minute long-form version and the 60-second television edit that ran across the United Kingdom in August 2019.
Creative Directors Nick Hulley and Nadja Lossgott led the Liberty Fields campaign at AMV BBDO. Copywriter Alex Grieve and Art Director Adrian Rossi completed the core creative team. Planners David Edwards, Lisa Stoney, and Alaina Crystal supported the strategic development of the campaign for Guinness in the United Kingdom.
Made of More is Guinness's long-running creative platform, managed by AMV BBDO since the agency won the account from Ogilvy and Mather in 1998. It spotlights individuals and groups defined by exceptional character. Liberty Fields extends the platform into women's sport, using the story of Japan's first international women's rugby squad as its subject.
Liam Gallagher is listed as an associated person on the Liberty Fields campaign, according to records documented at Clapboard.com. The specific nature of his involvement has not been publicly detailed beyond that credit. His association connected the campaign to a wider cultural moment in the United Kingdom that extended beyond the rugby context alone.
The Clapboard Score for Guinness Liberty Fields is 72 out of 100. This reflects the campaign's strong creative craft, cultural coherence, and strategic alignment with the Made of More platform, balanced against the absence of publicly verified performance data from Diageo, AMV BBDO, or any named third-party measurement source.
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