We're one of Ireland’s leading full service communications agencies. Our philosophy is simply, the Truth Well Told. We believe in finding the truth about a category, a brand or a consumer and amplifying it bravely and creatively.

Artists in Residence…

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Andrea.Galligan

My colleague Jen Maher and I joined Colin Doyle and Amanda Moran in the Residence Bar for the Eclipse Media Christmas bash back in December. It was great to celebrate with the guys and see our work for Coca Cola given such prominence on the night.

We have run several high profile outdoor campaigns with Eclipse on behalf of Three Mobile, Nescafe and Coca Cola and are always blown away at how they turn every challenge into an opportunity.

And it’s not just our clients they do superb work for – I especially liked the ‘industry first’ work they did for Philadelphia last year, where we saw touch screens embedded into 6 sheets. Consumers could navigate their way around the recipes and ingredients with an option to email the recipes to themselves. This allowed the client the ability to capture data as the software had a built in tracker for the most popular sites, days, recipes and amount of time spent on each page.

Here’s to another great year of innovation guys!

December 2011, Coca Cola, Open Happiness can dispenser

April 2011, Three Mobile, i-phone campaign

November 2011, Philadelphia ‘Love it’ campaign

“TV Is Not Dead, It Is Having Babies” Say RTE

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Orlaith.Blaney

In a hugely well attended breakfast meeting yesterday morning, the TV heavyweights were out in force.

RTE’s Geraldine O’Leary, TV3’s Daragh Byrne and Deirdre Macklin and Richard Kelly from Sky all lead precise and punchy presentation decks to tell us about the powerful nature of TV. Jonathan Joyce from Magna lead the session and new’ish boss at Initiative, Paul Farrell opened the proceedings. We are big fans of the power of television in the Irish market. And those who say TV is a dead medium could not be further from the truth. TV content is phenomenal source of conversation on twitter and the Nielsen numbers prove its power. Yes. We’re watching, tweeting, on the laptop during TV broadcasts and we’re multitasking but that doesn’t mean we aren’t paying attention. It is all about content and critically it is all about Irish content. 13 of the Top 20 programmes on TV3 were Irish content (well done TV3)– not imports. RTE’s Top 20 has 19 home produced programmes.

The demand for relevant Irish content continues to grow. Sky have a global view of things and most striking is their potential to stream in different ads, to different homes, depending on who lives there. So the families get a family car ad and the young singles get a run around car streamed to their homes. Powerful stuff. Richard Kelly can be very proud of what has to be one of the strongest media brands and ideas ; ‘’believe in better’’. What Sky lack in Irish content and Irish stats for the breakfast’s audience they more than make up for with their vision of how a media brand can use really powerful branding for leadership, confidence and stature. If you’re not on telly in 2012, put it on your ‘’to do’’ list and call us – or, at least think about it. If you want more information of the presentation, Laura Rickard at Initiative can help you with that and the final word to Geraldine O’Leary ; ‘TV IS NOT DEAD, IT IS HAVING BABIES”

Paul Farrell of Initiative with Ann Corcoran of limetree

TV3’s Daragh Byrne and Deirdre Macklin

RTE’s Geraldine O’Leary and Dara Meaney

Orlaith Blaney and Mary Reynolds

Fully Loaded

Posted on January 11, 2012 by NualaAnne.Murphy

If you’re one of the many people who were lucky enough to get a new laptop this Christmas, or purchased yourself one in the New Year sales, this new broadband product from Three might interest you. Three’s Mobile SURF KITS are a modem preloaded with data so you can just plug in and surf. Check out the nice little animation that we did with the Element; sound was done in Mutiny.

Hidden Hearing

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Onagh.Carolan

Look out for our new TV commercials for Hidden Hearing, which went on air on St. Stephen’s Day. The job of this commercial is to show people who may be suffering hearing loss how they are sometimes seen by the other people in their lives. With the campaign line ‘People notice hearing loss, not hearing aids’, we reveal how using a discreet hearing aid will help remove the barriers that separate them from others.

We shot the 40 second commercial in December with Speers Film. Lenny Abramson (award winning feature film director of ‘Garage, ‘Adam & Paul’ etc) directed and the six cast members were found after a lengthy casting process. We think the cast offer authentic, subtle and very effective performances which hopefully create a memorable call to action. The high production values and confident approach speaks volumes of Hidden Hearing’s brand leadership position.

HSA Farm Safety Campaign Launches

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Emma.Sharkey

As we ring in the New Year and look forward to all that it will bring, we must also look back over 2011.

Late last year we were briefed by the HSA to work on a farm safety campaign. It came as a huge shock to Ray and myself to discover how many people had died on Irish farms. What it is even more shocking is that from the time we were briefed until the campaign went live this year, five more people died, bringing the death toll for 2011 to 22 people.

Farming is officially the most deadly profession in Ireland but we hope our hard-hitting campaign will make some positive impact this year. The campaign consists of press, radio, and an online partnership with the Irish Farmer’s Journal. We will also be using the HSA’s sponsorship of RTE’s ‘Ear to the Ground’ to make our point. Check out the press and radio below.

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Happy Christmas from McCanns!

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Orlaith.Blaney

On behalf of everyone at McCann WorldGroup, we’d just like to say a huge thank you to all our partners in business in 2011. Our fantastic clients, our partners and teams at printers, recording studios, tv production teams, editors, illustrators, photographers and media owners and absolutely everyone who contributed to ensure the ideas we developed worked hard to build our clients brands and businesses. It was a challenging year and we’ve no doubt that 2012 will present some scenarios where we will need both our relentless determination and positivity to compete and succeed. Have a really great break over Christmas and a good rest. We’ll be back January 3rd – ready for whatever 2012 brings us!

BeSMART.ie

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Ray.Swan

One of our newest clients, the Health and Safety Authority,
recently came to us with a interesting task – make SME owners aware of their website, BeSMART.ie. BeSMART is a free online resource where business owners can complete a health and safety assessment.

First we gave the assessment a go ourselves. We quickly realised the McCann Erickson was a death trap and it was an absolute wonder that more of us weren’t dead. Some postulated that we were all already dead and this was a kind of weird 6th sense-ish purgatory.

Several hours later, as we got hungry, we came to the conclusion we were probably still alive and we’d better get to work. So we came up with a campaign which challenges people to find the health and safety issues in a photograph of an ordinary workplace.

It’s tricky.

And that’s the point – it can be tough to keep up to speed with the health and safety issues in your workplace. But, if you log onto BeSMART.ie the online assessment will do it for you.

Have a listen to our BeSMART radio here…

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Shaking up the Happiness with Coke.

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Nikki.Gregory

In the spirit of Christmas, and Coca Cola, our creative team at McCanns came up with a very generous way of “Sharing the Happiness” this festive season. Enlisting the help of our friends at Eclipse Media, we installed a six sheet mini-can dispenser in several Shopping Centers around Ireland to the delight of the general public. With a simple wave of the hand, the six sheet dispenses a free can of either Coke, Diet Coke, or Coke Zero, with a total of 50,000 of them being given away over Christmas. We went out to one of the locations, the Ilac Shopping Centre, to film this mechanical gift giver in action and to see the reaction of its users.

Take a look….

They’re Back!

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Emma.Sharkey

All of us at McCann’s are very excited to bring Jedward back for a very Three Christmas. Jedward and Santa on the same couch, you know it’s going to be magic! We have a feeling that the limited edition Jedward Samsung Europa will be on quite a few wish lists this Christmas…sorry to the parents out there, but at just €69 it’s a bit of a bargain.

A Tricky Task from safefood.

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Emma.Sharkey

safefood came to us with an interesting task. They needed a campaign that educated the public on the dangers of spreading germs and harmful bacteria while preparing food. The challenge for us was that they already had a TV commercial, but nothing else. So, we set about translating their striking TV ad into print and radio, while our strategic partners, Zoo brought it to life online. See the links below to watch the TV, view our print, and listen to our radio.

PRINT

48 sheet

6 sheet

RADIO

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Dream Big.

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Yvonne.Otoole

Personally I don’t think I ever ‘solved’ a Rubik’s Cube – even though I am totally a child of the 80’s!
But I also never thought of using it to create a brilliantly unusual piece of artwork the way Pete Fecteau has done here.
Entitled ‘Dream Big’ Pete used 4,242 original Rubik’s Cubes to create a mosaic of Dr Martin Luther King.
The construction process took him approx 40 hours to complete and he came in the top 50 out of over 1,700 entrants world in ArtPrize 2011…which is quite an achievement.
He’s a designer from Michigan and it was while volunteering with registration duties for the ArtPrize (the world’s largest art competition) that he woke up one morning with the idea of using the Rubik’s Cube to create something.
Dare I say it he may have….wait for it….’had a dream’…?
Check it out below…

The power of great packaging.

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Orlaith.Blaney

One of the exciting things about the world of communication is that there is always an opportunity to improve how you look – whether it is your on-shelf presence, your packaging design, your ads or your blog.
We love ‘Steve’s Leaves’ from the UK – reason being there are few exciting things happening, packaging wise, in the fruit and vegetable aisles in our supermarkets.

Another positive development is the brilliant work Niall Corcoran at Creative Inc has done for Donnelly Fresh Foods. Says Mel O’Rourke, Creative Director of Creative Inc.: “Typefaces which encapsulated old-school craftsmanship, stripey multi-coloured awnings and brown paper bags all contributed to our vision of how the new Donnelly Fresh Foods brand should look, feel and behave.”
Have a look:

The guy next door.

Posted on October 28, 2011 by John.McMahon

Our client, Next Door off licences, asked us to produce a radio ad informing listeners about a number of special offers they had in each of their 60 outlets. They also wanted the ad to be Halloween themed. And, naturally enough, they wanted us to make it interesting or entertaining enough to not make listeners feel like setting fire to themselves every time they heard it (as, to be fair, many radio ads do).

I didn’t have a huge amount of time so I deployed a number of tried and tested techniques to get the juices flowing. First I tried a standard chin-stroke. Then I went for a slow-motion ear pinch. Then I opted to massage my skull with my knuckles while staring through the window of a Kelkin muesli packet. It was only after self-administering the cranial equivalent of a Chinese burn that I came up with something I felt audacious enough to call “an idea”. Why not develop a character named… oh, I dunno… The Guy From Next Door?

On the one hand, The Guy From Next Door can be a brand emissary in the traditional sense, who gets the name out there in a simple way while delivering all the relevant product information – just like the Meerkat, the infuriatingly smug Churchill or that bloke off the telly wot does the UPC ads. On the other hand, he can also deliver engagement by allowing us to parody those radio ads we all hate, in which two people innocently having a conversation are interrupted by someone who just happens to be in possession of that nugget of consumer information that will turn their lives around in 30 seconds without the need for surgery.

Look: I could spend all day describing it but by the end of it you’d be as bearded as I am and none the wiser. If, after hearing it, people (a) know that Next Door is the country’s biggest chain of off licences, (b) know there some great Halloween deals on offer and (c) have been provided with a modicum of entertainment, then it works. Have a listen and judge for yourself…

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Irish True.

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Shay.Madden

This month saw the launch of an exciting new global campaign for our client Tullamore Dew. Created and conceived by US creatives Jeff Weiss and Paul Opperman with a little help from ourselves, the print features striking images and charismatic characters that evoke the true spirit of the Irish. The print images were beautifully shot by Moshe Brakha.

The tv was shot locally in Dublin in Bongo Ryan’s pub, directed by the well known film maker Jake Scott.

On Your Bikes Ladies

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Yvonne.Otoole

Thinking about ads for slimming/low cal products and came to the conclusion …aren’t they all pretty much the same?
A pretty girl, in a nice pretty (red?) dress and some happy music..
But, how do you engage young women in a very simple product that is good for you and at the same time make it great fun.
Something that makes an impact, is memorable and PR’able.
This is not an advertisement, it is a powerful piece of brand engagement.
And it’s cheeky (…actually Gerard Butler came to mind for some reason?)
We love it.
See what you think?