Driving social media buzz for O'Neill's

Challenge

To use our restaurant marketing expertise to position O’Neill’s as the place to be for St Patrick’s Day celebrations by generating excitement across its social media channels. 

As an Irish-themed pub, St Patrick’s Day is O’Neill’s’ equivalent to celebrating Christmas – so this is a key date for the pub.

Our goals were to promote reasons to visit and to create entertaining and engaging content that appeals to the venue’s Gen Z and millennial audience.

Solution

We conducted extensive research to find that vox pops and street interviews were a growing trend on social media that was resonating with our Gen Z and millennial 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.