Ireland/Davenport
Advertising in Sandton

Johannesburg-based boutique advertising agency.

Ireland/Davenport is a fully empowered and South African boutique communications agency that is committed to coming up with creative ideas to help clients solve business challenges and sell their product. We have grown from a staff complement of three to a fully integrated, medium-sized agency with a huge heart and a big brain. We take our relationships, clients and our work seriously, but not ourselves. We work hard, love what we do and laughter prevails. In our very short life we have made some beautiful stuff. We believe in making our clients famous and our people legendary and this is just the beginning. Investec Asset Management has developed a product called the Investec Opportunity Fund, designed to help you save for your retirement and thus ensure you won’t still be working in 40 years time. The aim of the campaign for the business was to inform existing as well as potential new clients about how a fund that consistently out performs inflation is the ideal way to save for their retirement. Their mandate was to create engagement and awareness in their target audiences’ areas. We needed to capture the attention of consumers who have been overexposed to requests for their help (and have become numb to the pleads of NGO’s), to solicit signatures for the Free Zimbabwe campaign, with an aim of bringing free and fair elections to Zimbabwe. For Season 2 of the Walking Dead, our task was to bring the visceral nature of the zombies featured on the show to life in a relevant and engaging way through a cinema experience. Due to the success of the first season of The Walking Dead, TOP TV and FOX International wanted to create hype around the second season and get the general public talking, as well as converting those into viewership numbers. We wanted to catch this target group out of its comfort zone for a completely, visceral new experience that they would talk to their friends about. We would then seed the content only to heighten the excitement even more. We created a fake trailer that flighted prior to the movie. A live actor in full zombie makeup enters the cinema half way through the trailer and begins distracting audiences. The actress on screen becomes distracted by the zombie and pulls out a gun, fires and kills the zombie, then nonchalantly goes back to her conversation: creating interactivity and talkability. And if he does, it will have an enormous impact on our democracy. In order to encourage people to stand up for their rights, we decided to highlight just how drastic this new law could be, by showing how easily it could result in jail time. We sent out an email to 300 journalists and another additional database of non-journalists, with an authentic top-secret medical record attached. We then informed the reader that just by looking at or being in possession of a document the government decides they don’t want the press seeing, you will have committed a crime punishable by up to 25 years in jail. We then directed journalists to a site, with a dedicated form, where they could pledge their support. We identified that there was in fact, a very real and relevant interest in World War history from this age group. The popularity and consequent success of war games on every available console has been extraordinary. We decided to target the launch of the next chapter of arguably the most popular simulated war game; Call of Duty: Ghost.