Bohemian F.C., often referred to as “Bohs”, is a professional soccer club based out of Dublin, Ireland. It is a founding member of the League Of Ireland, the country’s domestic professional league.
The challenge was to assist ‘Bohs’ with media relations support to hit an untapped global audience of fans and drive sales of its Bob Marley-inspired shirt, which pays homage to that famed Marley Dalymount gig from 1980, ‘An Afternoon in the Park’.
Our team understood instantly that this would become a mainstream story. Due to this, we segmented the entire media relations approach across: (i) geographies and (ii) media verticals, personalizing pitches to make this launch announcement as relevant as possible to as wide an audience of journalists.
After initial launch pre-pitching and day-of-release outreach was conducted, we shifted gears to piggyback on published media coverage through social media posts from these publications to re-engage with media outlets that had yet to cover the news. The idea was to highlight that this was a trending story to cover, given the engagement and conversations happening on social media platforms.
168 Articles
Coverage secured in top international, business and consumer publications.
6 Weeks
Order backlog due to media relations.
15.5 Million
Estimated audience that viewed the coverage generated.
68
Aggregate Domain Authority (DA) score of the publications which published.
1.2 Billion
Combined audience that are unique monthly visitors (UMVs) to the media outlets that covered Bohs stories.
1.2 Million
Coverage that was viewed via social posts accompanying media articles.
32,400
Organic social posts prompted by the launch media placements.
2
Industry recognition garnered via awards campaign for the work completed by Wise Up PR, with accolades secured from leading PR and marketing awards programs.
Wise Up PR took a highly local product launch and turned it into a global cultural, viral story covered by a wide swath of top-tier media outlets, including BBC, CNN, ESPN and Forbes, with coverage views estimated at 15.5 million. Beyond performance metrics, media coverage was pinpointed to as an essential driver of demand for the shirt, contributing to a six-week backlog of orders from launch day.
The one-off PR project earned Wise Up PR two industry awards: An Excellence Award For A Public Relations Campaign with The Communicator Awards, and PR Campaign Of The Year from The Stevie® Awards.
Excellence Award For A Public Relations Campaign 2023
PR Campaign Of The Year 2022
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Global Media Relations Campaign, Honourable Mention 2022
Culture jacking is where a brand is able to tap in and align itself with a cultural trend or issue. Yet in the case of a brand actually being able to use a cultural icon in its campaign, the brand can jack the culture. This is a very, very rare scenario for any brand to find itself in. But if you do, it offers a once in a moment chance and from a tactical standpoint, you should go extremely broad with media targets, given your icon is recognized widely. Culture can span sports, business, consumer, music and many more media verticals.
Consumer launches shouldn’t just live within digital or print media outlets. Broadcast media needs to be a key plank of tactical focus, especially as consumer brands reach and influence regular people. By contrast, a B2B brand, from a broadcast perspective, is likely confined to business broadcast opportunities. In addition, broadcast is very broad, from national to local to podcasts. This means that with the right, targeted pitch, you can maximize your opportunities with media.
A consumer brand will find it hard to generate much interest with media if it doesn’t have an extensive “bank” of content assets. This bank needs to include reams of b-roll video content and a wide variety of high-resolution imagery of products, campaign launch visuals and even key spokespeople’s headshots. By not investing in the creation of such assets, both your media relations efforts and social media output will suffer.
Beyond planning the creative, something more fundamental can sometimes get lost in the ramp-up to a consumer brand’s launch day. Can people easily access additional information and buy or order the product online? Is your online shop actually able to manage and process an extremely high volume of web traffic driven from our media relations activity? If you fail to prepare for online infrastructure to meet demand, your PR campaign will suffer.
