Tourism Ireland’s €1 million marketing campaign for 2015 was launched this week, targeting audiences in Britain, the US and Continental Europe.
It coincided with the Christmas holiday period and was aimed at people planning holidays in 2015.
Ads promoting Ireland as a tourist destination also began airing on Friday on American television networks ABC, NBC and CBS across seven cities – Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco – during primetime slots. These are all vital gateway cities for Irish tourism – with direct flights to the island of Ireland. The Ireland ads will air around premium entertainment programmes with large audiences over the holiday period, including the high profile New Year’s Eve Countdown, and the Kennedy Center Honors. The ads will reach millions more Americans when they also run on the online channels of the various TV networks, in five cities. The campaign will also see Ireland advertising on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) around season five of the hugely popular Downton Abbey in January and February; and also around the re-run of series four, during December.
The campaign includes three new ads – for Dublin and Wicklow, the Wild Atlantic Way and Northern Ireland. The soundtrack is the hit single “Love Like This” by popular Dublin rock band Kodaline.
The organisation will cover the front and back pages of Daily Telegraph in Britain this week. The ad will feature images of the Cliffs of Moher, Eyries village on the Beara Peninsula in Co Cork, Powerscourt Gardens and Dublin.
Other components of the ad campaign include collaboration with the Mail Online website to promote Dublin as a tourist destination by highlighting favourite haunts of celebrities including Rihanna, Beyoncé and Jay-Z when they are in town. Ads promoting Dublin also appeared this month in cinemas in France and Germany, reaching up to four million French and 750,000 German viewers.
Niall Gibbons, Tourism Ireland’s CEO, said: “2014 will be another record year for visitor numbers to the island of Ireland from the United States. By the end of this year, we will have welcomed about 1.2 million American visitors – contributing more than US$1 billion to our economy. Tourism Ireland has had a very busy programme of promotions right throughout 2014, keeping the island of Ireland to the forefront of American consumers’ minds as a premier vacation destination. We aim to build on this success in 2015.”
