Cinzano of the vermouth market in Europe was measured in the low single digits, sales that placed it a distant second to Martini. As a result of a 1997 merger, Grand Metropolitan became Diageo; two years later, Diageo sold Cinzano to the privately held Gruppo Campari. The Cinzano bicycling team had a central role in the film "Breaking Away". Cinzano was well known in Britain for its humorous television advertisements featuring Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins. One of these featured the pair on a plane journey, with Rossiter accidentally hitting the "recline" switch on Collins chair, causing her to spill a
Joan Collins to her plus a further $1 million for the first completed manuscript, but that the publisher did not have to pay for the second manuscript since it was essentially a reworking of the first. "Guinness World Records" cites Collins as holding the record for retaining the world's largest unreturned payment for an unpublished manuscript. In the early 1950s, Collins appeared as a teenager in a Gas Board Commercial. In the early 1970s, she appeared in television and magazine advertisements for British Airways, in which she was referred to as their "Most Frequent Flyer of First Class", a title she has