St Patrick's Day is a hectic date on the marketing calendar. But if anyone has the right to take advantage of the natural buzz around the celebration, it's Tourism Ireland.

Following on from the success of our 'Push The Green Button' campaign, the brief was to create a disruptive idea that would cut through the noise on St. Patrick's Day, getting people to reevaluate their idea of Irish culture and building awareness of Ireland as a holiday destination.

St Patrick’s Day. A global celebration of Irish culture. The perfect time to encourage people to visit Ireland. However, with everyone jumping on the green bandwagon, it’s hard to cut through the noise. Unless you’re even louder…

We started a digital music festival with a lineup of authentic Irish music, and turned DOOH sites in major cities across the world into stages. All you had to do to start the show was scan the ad, then press the green button. Revellers enjoyed performances in real time from built-in billboard speakers and through their headphones. Those not in NYC, Sydney, Milan or London still got in on the action, watching the sets on our online stage, where anyone could find out more about our artists. The world got jiggy with it, authentic Irish acts got global exposure and everyone was reminded - there’s only one place to experience real Irish culture.

We offered something much more exciting than the usual Paddy's Day promotion - and much more authentic, showcasing real, up and coming Irish music.

To cut through the noise our PR strategy worked in 3 parts, standing out as an ad campaign, tourism campaign and a music festival.

We started off by leveraging the presence of John C Reilly in Dublin as International Guest of Honour at the St. Patrick's Festival – to promote the Green Button Festival.

We galvanised Tourism Ireland's reach as it celebrated its national day all over the world, harnessing it all with #GreenButtonFestival to push it out via a paid news wire service.

Finally we PR'd the festival to the music press, reaching out to music publications and announcing it as an event. Through all these channels we were able to achieve 62,512,161 Impressions.

Leading up to the event, we released promo films across our social channels that were shared by our artists and organically by their fans (and ours!). John C. Reilly even spoke about the event! Festival Ticket emails went out to our international database.

On the day, thousands of passers-by enjoyed our billboard stages from Times Square to Sydney Harbour with thousands more joining in online - many of whom shared pictures videos of the event on their channels.

16,423,513 Video Views YouTube

1,830,540 Video Views Twitter

6,007,463 Video Views FB & IG

62,512,161 Impressions

Tourism Ireland's website had its busiest day ever!