3 Industry 4.0 Strategy Actions

Global Reputation and Communications Strategy

The main campaign video in the Embassy’s social media Japanese-language feed received over 11 million impressions between promoted and organic views and was seen some 85,000 times as a pinned tweet on the Embassy’s English-language Twitter feed. In addition, the ireland.ie website was translated into Japanese for the campaign.

A central objective of the Global Ireland programme is to implement a co-ordinated, cross Government, integrated approach to promoting Ireland as a good place to live, invest, trade with, visit, and study. A key focus for this is the development of ireland.ie as an integrated all-of-Government digital platform to showcase Ireland as a great place to live, invest, trade with, visit, and study. A beta site is now live and significant further development is planned for 2021.

Notably, this was the first integrated (and co-funded) promotional campaign involving state agencies, with funding provided by DFA, IDA, Tourism Ireland, Bord Bia, and Enterprise Ireland.

This was a significant achievement, enabling a joined-up effort in a market with a recognised visibility issue. It was an important pilot approach and demonstration of ‘proof of concept’ of the strength of collaboration among Team Ireland.

A pilot integrated communications campaign was launched around the 2019 Japan Rugby World Cup. The Government sought to maximise the benefit arising from Ireland’s participation in the World Cup (RWC), which took place from 20 September – 2 November 2019.

Outlook for 2021

Using a collaborative Team Ireland approach, approximately 40 separate stakeholders worked together to meet the project’s requirement to capitalise on Ireland’s participation in the Rugby World Cup to raise Ireland’s visibility in Japan.

Drawing on the success of, and lessons learned from, the Rugby World Cup Japan campaign, work is accelerating on the development of a Global Reputation and Communications Strategy that:

• Delivers an authentic image of Ireland that resonates both at home and abroad; • Is based upon a robust governance framework and stakeholder input to drive effective collaboration; • Utilises the technology resources and expertise of the state to deliver a usable integrated digital platform for Government internationally; and • Has a measurement framework to deliver for meaningful measurement of results and insights to stakeholders. A ‘one stop’ digital showcase of Ireland abroad will also be developed through a renewed Ireland.ie, as an all-of-Government international digital platform.

A specific goal for the RWC promotional project was to deliver a high-quality, video-led online campaign which raised Ireland’s visibility across the range of Team Ireland interests in Japan.

This was a very useful prototype for future multi department/agency initiatives. The six videos produced received 32 million impressions and 9.8 million views over the 30-day campaign. During two weekends in the course of RWC2019 Ireland trended as lead item searched on some of Japan’s leading search engines.

Figure from page 22