Best Covid Communications Campaign at the Guild of Agricultural Journalists Awards 2020
&Smyth wins second industry award of 2020
On Friday December 18th, the team at &Smyth (formerly Gemma Smyth Communications) was delighted to be announced as the winner of the ‘Best Covid Communications campaign’ at the Guild of Agricultural Journalists Awards 2020 for our work with Certified Irish Angus on its brand repositioning campaign.
Background
Certified Irish Angus marked 25 years in business at the beginning of 2020 and although it had significant brand equity within the agri-food space, it did not have as much awareness with Irish consumers. The organisation embarked on a significant project in 2019 in order to reposition the brand as relevant to the modern Irish consumer. Its premium beef product range is exclusively sold nationwide under the Tesco Finest* luxury range.
The Brief
Certified Irish Angus engaged the services of Gemma Smyth Communications to assist in the management of the development of a new look and feel for the brand with supporting website and social media channels and the roll out of a strong communications campaign to support this repositioning
In order to celebrate 25 years of the organisation, a number of initiatives were planned for 2020 including stakeholders events and promotions and a number of new farmer initiatives which were set to provide strong news hooks for media and communications activity
The impact of Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdowns across the country meant that all of this planned activity had to be revisited and revised and a digital-first campaign rolled out in its place.
Our Approach
The campaign had to address two distinct audiences: Consumer (Main household shopper) and Trade (Industry partners and farmer members).
Our campaign tactics includes social media strategy involving a teaser campaign for the new website; a reveal campaign to include paid social and a series of competitions; and ongoing comprehensive social media content campaign.
To reach agri-industry stakeholders we delivered a number of print and online advertorials with agri-media outlets including The Irish Examiner, Irish Farmers Journal and Agriland.
We also worked with well-respected food and sports content creators on recipe development for the Certified Irish Angus brand. This included:
Daniel Davey, Leinster and Dublin GAA Nutrition Coach, best-selling cookbook author and part-time beef farmer from Sligo.
Imen McDonnell, Food writer and photographer, Author and blogger of Farmette, part-time dairy farmer.
Eoin Sheehan, Virgin Media TV chef and recipe creator based in Limerick. Interested in simple, tasty food, and fitness & prominent across Youtube and Instagram.
Results
Anecdotal feedback from key stakeholders revealed that they were impressed with the quality of content and the reach of the campaign.
The activity generated strong engagement across all social media for the tactics employed.
The campaign also generated a significant volume of traffic to the new Certified Irish Angus website in the first month.