noitulovE ("Evolution" backwards) is a British television and cinema advertisement launched by Diageo in 2005 to promote Guinness Draught stout.

The commercial shows, in reverse, the adventures of three characters who evolve from mudskippers to present day humans before tasting Guinness in a London pub.

The impact of the campaign was such that during a period in which the UK beer market experienced a substantial decline in revenue, Guinness reported that its year-on-year earnings within the region had noticeably increased.

As they move down the street, a reverse time-lapse sequence transforms their clothes to match a rapidly changing urban scene, which progresses through modern-day London to the Edwardian period.

"[3] Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO won the account for Guinness in 1996 with a campaign built on their new strapline "Good things come to those who wait".

They produced several commercials using variations on the theme, including Swimblack, Bet on Black, and the critically acclaimed Surfer, voted the "Best Advert of All Time" by the British public in 2002.

[1] AMV BBDO were presented with the choice of coming up with either a new theme to appeal to the 18–35 British male demographic or a new angle on the tried and tested Good things... concept.

[1] From this concept, noitulovE was quickly plotted out: the advert would show three individuals waiting 500,000,000 years before finally taking their first sip of Guinness, the timeline compressed into a 50-second clip.

[1][3] The project had not yet been greenlit when the agency approached Daniel Kleinman, known for his work on James Bond title sequences, with the intention of taking him on as a director.

Storyboarding the commercial meant that the agency could determine how much of the £1.3M budget to allocate to each section, and provided them with visuals to use as part of the presentation to Diageo when pitching the various concepts for a decision on which to pursue.

The footage obtained formed the major part of the final cut of the scene, with only one or two post-production changes: the addition of tail fins and animation of the expression of disgust that closes the piece.

[1][3] Stop motion footage of other real elements was taken, including a stage-by-stage blowtorching of plants, used to show flora coming back to life in the reverse sequence, and shots of baking bread, used to model the geological changes to background rock formations.

[7] Additional real elements were to have been incorporated into the commercial, mostly from stock footage of several animal species, but only short segments of apes and lizards appeared in the final cut.

As the final commercial was to be shown on cinema screens, the animators worked at a resolution higher than that afforded by the 576i definition used by British PAL-encoded television sets, to improve the appearance of the advert when projected.

[1][10] Near the end of post-production, the creative team decided that the music chosen to accompany the advert, an electronic track by Groove Armada, was not working particularly well.

Spots were purchased in the commercial breaks of sports broadcasts, high-budget television dramas and shows whose primary audience overlapped with the campaign's target demographic of British males in the 24–35 age range.

The first burst was commissioned to run from 3 October to 13 November 2005, during programming such as the UEFA Champions League, Lost, Vincent, Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway and terrestrial television screenings of Austin Powers: Goldmember.

"[16][31] The main competition for the prize was thought to be the Australian Big Ad for Carlton draught beer, and the British Balls, for Sony's BRAVIA line of high-definition television sets.

These included Mars (with Rutger Hauer reprising his role as the "Pure Genius"),[36] Anticipation, Fish Bicycle, Surfer, and Bet on Black.

In the second, the sea through which the three fish bound backwards in the original spot is frozen while the trio are in mid-leap, leaving the characters skidding across the surface.

In the final version, the primeval pool at the end of the original spot freezes while the mudskippers are taking their drink, and the protagonists' tongues are left stuck in the ice.