Celebrating St Patrick’s Day with O’Neill’s 

Challenge

As an Irish-themed pub, St Patrick’s Day is O’Neill’s’ equivalent to celebrating Christmas. 

Whilst the pub is well-known across the UK as a great night out, we were briefed to help position O’Neill’s as the place to be for this year’s St Patrick’s Day celebrations by generating excitement across its social media channels. 

As part of our ongoing work with O’Neill’s, we have three core goals: to promote reasons to visit, to create entertaining and engaging content that appeals to the venue’s audience, and to execute larger campaigns that aligned with Mitchell’s & Butler’s wider marketing strategies.  

Our “Craicing Crew” campaign, planned and executed in the build-up to St Patrick’s Day, enabled us to achieve all three of these goals. 

Solution

We tapped into our expertise in social media and understanding of the hospitality sector, both of which have been nurtured by supporting Mitchells & Butlers to launch hundreds of pubs and restaurants across the UK as well as managing the social media channels for Sizzling Pubs, Ember Inns and O’Neill’s.  

As one of the only Irish-themed pub chains in the UK, St Patrick’s Day offers a golden opportunity to showcase O’Neill’s’ offering and pay homage to its Irish heritage. 

From extensive research, we found that vox pops and street interviews were a growing trend on social media that was resonating with our Gen Z and millennials  audience.  

We took inspiration from this style of content, adapted it to align with the O’Neill’s brand, and added an Irish twist by creating the “Craicing Crew” — a content creation group made up of carefully-curated influencers.  

What followed was a stream of content across O’Neill’s social media channels in the build-up to St Patrick’s Day — content that saw passersby quizzed by our “Craicing Crew” on topics such as Irish slang, trivia, music, and celebrities and challenged to ‘split the G’, a popular Guinness-related drinking challenge that has become popular on social media in recent years.  

Using Irish dialect and slang and tapping into Irish popular culture enabled us to create a consistent stream of messaging that linked back to our St Patrick’s Day theme, without being sales-focused, and share tailored content that would engage our target audience.