Brief
O’Neill’s briefed us to help generate excitement around their pubs during the spring period across two campaigns. They asked us to deliver consumer PR and a brand strategy across two core weekends in their calendar, St Patrick’s Day and their 25th birthday across both traditional and digital media relations.
The aim was to position the Irish pub brand as the place to be at this craic-ing time of year.
Action
The activity was split into two campaigns. For St Patrick’s Day we liaised with each pub to promote individual activities such as live music, face painting and Irish dancing. On top of that the brand planned in a range of activities to take place nationwide, such as an Irish take on the traditional pub quiz, Irish Craic-oke (karaoke) and multiple drinks offers including a shot for £2 with every pint purchased.
We worked with general managers at regional pub level to invite their favourite Irish celebrities to join them in celebrating the big day. We then photographed the team wearing the masks of well-known Irish celebs such as Dara O’Brian, Niall Horan and Laura Whitmore while enjoying a pint of Guinness together.
For their 25th birthday we worked with the brand to give away free pints to people called Neill. We developed the concept and T&Cs, before utilising our extensive network of media contacts and consumer PR to get the message out to national and regional press.
Results
The outreach to regional titles was successful with 74 pieces of coverage generated during the spring period, across national and regional press and events sites. The St Patrick’s Day coverage reached upwards of 26 million people and the 25th birthday coverage reached over 141.4 million people across the country.
Both activities worked well online, due to the clickbait-style headlines and we were able to achieve coverage with key online targets such as LadBible, the Daily Mirror the Liverpool Echo and Leicestershire Live.
