Weekends "don’t come much bigger for Guinness" than St. Patrick’s Day, according to Joe Hall of CITY A.M. The brand’s two biggest sports sponsorships in Western Europe were "populating TV screens, newspaper pages and social media feeds." Guinness is "not only the official beer of the Six Nations and both the Ireland and England teams," which met in the tournament’s "curtain call event" on Saturday evening, it is a "visible partner" of the Cheltenham Festival, which attracts over 60,000 people to the racecourse every year. Diageo Head of Sponsorship for Western Europe Rory Sheridan said, "This is the biggest weekend of the year for the Guinness storehouse as well, we’re doing about 6,000 visitors a day. I bet this weekend there’s going to be a lot of English among them." Sheridan said that the value of Diageo’s sports sponsorships "is derived not solely from visible inventory but from building long-standing associations." The firm has pouring deals in Six Nations venues -- "getting pints in hands" -- but also sets up "branded destinations such as the Guinness Village at Cheltenham." Sheridan: "We have long legacy deals, but these aren’t sentimental. Not only are they still valuable to us as a business, but we’ve got massive credentials and have been connected for so long that any activity we do using them stands for something. Rugby and horse racing are events of substance. They mean a lot to people" (CITY A.M., 3/18).
