THE Dutch film legend Rutger Hauer, star of hit movies such as Blade Runner, featured some years ago in a series of television commercials for Guinness.

He was, so the makers of the ads suggested, the embodiment of the iconic stout — his blond hair and long dark overcoat conveying the idea of the black-and-white pint.

While the clips proved an enduring addition to the pantheon of classic Guinness ads, the company never took the next step of capitalising on Hauer’s Hollywood appeal and turning the character in the advertisements into a movie.

Diageo, Guinness’s owner, did make this leap in Africa, the second-biggest market for the brand outside its traditional markets in Britain and Ireland. The company created and financed a feature film based on a series of television ads that had been running across the continent.

The lead character of the television commercials, and the movie, is not played by Hauer but by an imposing bald black James Bond-style character known on and off screen as Michael Power.

The film, called Critical Assignment, cost about £2.3m to make and was released in 2003. A conspiracy thriller with a plot revolving round the government of a fictional African country diverting spending from water, the action is interspersed every so often with scenes of the main characters sitting round in bars taking long pulls on their bottles of, naturally, Guinness.

The film was a hit. “We launched it in Kenya. It was around for six weeks and took about as much money as the Bond film,” said its producer, Bob Mahoney. Diageo was delighted with the impact of the film on sales of Guinness across the region.

Critical Assignment, though intended purely for the African market, has begun to attract international interest, much to the pleasant surprise of those involved. Screenings at a number of festivals last year, such as the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, brought Critical Assignment to the attention of a wider audience. It won critical acclaim, prompting one distributor to sign it up for an American DVD release. It made its home-video debut last month.

A sales agent was also appointed to sell the film into other territories at this year’s Cannes festival, proving a further boon to Diageo. “This is the cherry on the cake,” said Matt Barwell, marketing director for Guinness Africa.

Diageo does not expect the film to boost sales of the stout in other territories, however. “Guinness is a truly global brand, but the way it appears in the eyes of consumers is very different across different geographies,” said Barwell.

In short, however pleased Diageo is with the way Critical Assignment has played to date, the exercise is likely to remain a one-off.

The idea of a consumer-goods company using film to promote its products is hardly original, but the critical and commercial success of the project that Diageo is enjoying is a first.

Product placement — companies paying to have their goods used by the stars of a particular film — has long been an accepted technique to offset some of a title’s production costs. The children’s sci-fi movie Mac, made in 1988, featured more than a passing reference to a certain hamburger chain. Although McDonald’s did not finance the film, one of its producers had previously worked for the fast-food giant’s advertising agency.

More recently, Rowan Atkinson brought the hero of the Barclaycard television advertisements from the 1980s onto the big screen with the James Bond spoof Johnny English. Barclaycard said it was “impossible to say” what impact, if any, the film had on sales of its credit card. It is also thought that Johnson & Johnson, the consumer-goods giant, is developing a feature film in Italy, as a way of promoting some of its brands.

But some experts believe that there may be more efficient ways to boost sales. Edward Sharp, who specialises in film-related work for the marketing agency Mindshare, said: “It’s not something I would recommend clients to do. There are too many risks and unknowns. Clients would have to know exactly what they wanted to achieve, the kind of money they were putting in and what kind of return they wanted.”

While Diageo may not rush to produce Critical Assignment 2, who knows, maybe the success of its first film will tempt it to bring back Hauer after all.

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