The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) is Ireland’s largest sporting organisation, and It is part of the Irish consciousness, playing an influential role in Irish society that extends far beyond sport.

Every summer the All-Ireland Football Championship captures the attention of the Irish public, and regional towns heave with the arrival of large numbers of supporters and the colour, noise and excitement that they bring. In the region of 1.5 million people attend the GAA Championships from May to September.

Put simply, summer in Ireland starts and ends with the GAA All-Ireland Football Championship. But in 2020, due to Covid-19, Ireland faced its first summer without one. And the main sponsor, AIB Bank, faced their toughest challenge yet - how do you sponsor a Championship with no games?

As creators of #TheToughest platform, we weren’t going to abandon our audience during the toughest season in the history of GAA. While it would have been easy to wait until games came back, it was clear that there was a story unfolding that only we could tell. Instead of waiting for the return of action on the field, we decided to tell the story of the support off it.

But, how do you sponsor a Championship with no games?

By showing what GAA is really all about. It’s not about supporting your county - it’s about supporting each other.

So, we created a series, ‘The Toughest Summer’ starring GAA players, coaches, volunteers and fans supporting their communities all across the country.

Irish people believe that no matter how tough things get on or off the field, the values instilled in them by GAA can help them rise to any challenge.

The fundamental values of GAA are passion, commitment and community and these would be needed more than ever as Irish sport faced its toughest summer in history.

We knew the GAA community wasn’t going to shy away from the action. Because the tougher it gets, the stronger the GAA communities would become.

It was on the back of this belief, that ‘The Toughest Summer’ was created.

‘The Toughest Summer’ launched as a 5-part online series, with the campaign culminating in a feature-length documentary aired on the nation’s biggest TV broadcast channel, on what should have been the week of the All-Ireland Football Final.

A key consideration for implementing the campaign were the changes to in-home and media consumption of our audience as a result of lockdown. With this in mind, we sought to amplify the content across owned, earned and paid channels across three key time periods:

- Launch (increase awareness with GAA fans)

- Maintain (drive webisodes views)

- Peak (driving broad audience awareness of documentary)

‘The Toughest Summer’ surpassed all targets and played a key part in our long-term objective of driving brand affinity for AIB, particularly during a challenging year for the bank.

Campaign Reach hit 63 million impressions. We achieved more than 3 million views of the webisodes across social channels with over 220k viewers for the TV broadcast documentary with a peak viewing figure of over 400k. Positive sentiment increased from 82% to 94% during broadcast.

Not a single minute of Championship football was played during the toughest summer. But by the end of it, we had created AIB’s highest performing campaign in over 30 years of GAA sponsorship.