SAVOUR KILKENNY

Aileen Gaskin led the Savour Kilkenny Food Festival campaigns in 2023 and 2024. We were recommended to Savour Kilkenny’s Festival Director by a journalist.

Objective:

The objective was to increase attendance at Savour Kilkenny. Our target audience was primarily people from Kilkenny and the surrounding counties, followed by attendees from all over Ireland.

We had a very short window of less than two months to create mass awareness for Savour Kilkenny 2023 and 2024.

What we did:

With a huge programme of events spanning the bank holiday weekend in October, we held weekly meetings with the Festival Director and the marketing team. 

We began by preparing for the launch of the festival which was organised by the festival team. We organised the photographer and videographer and drafted questions for our spokespeople. We created a one minute video as well as shorter snippets for social media featuring some of the people involved in the events at Savour. It also included the Festival Director and key sponsors. 

Media Relations:

We teamed up with the local media outlets (KCLR FM, Kilkenny People and Kilkenny Observer) to feed them as much content as possible over the seven weeks. We lined up guests for the Farm Show, KCLR Daily and the Saturday Show with Edward Hayden in the weeks leading up to the event. Each week, the Kilkenny People based their ‘Day in the Life’ column on a person related to Savour Kilkenny. 

As well as these local media outlets, we lined up interviews in other media outlets such as Virgin Media’s Ireland AM (Deric O’Hartigan did a live broadcast from Kilkenny from 7-10am in the run up to the event), Today FM’s Dave Moore Show, Newstalk’s Moncrieff and Alive and Kicking, the Mario Rosenstock podcast, Sunday World, Irish Daily Mirror, Irish Daily Star, Business Post Weekend Magazine, Irish Examiner

Weekend Magazine, Irish Independent Weekend Magazine, Irish Examiner & Irish Times Staycations supplement, Irish Examiner USA, Irish Daily Mail’s YOU Magazine,

Irishcentral.com, Irish Country Magazine, RSVP, The Gloss, Image.ie, Dining in Dublin, Hotel & Catering Review, Hotel & Restaurant Times, Hospitality Ireland, Shelflife, TheTaste.ie, Travel Extra, Carlow Live, Laois Live, Galway Advertiser, Leinster Express and Beat 102 103, just to name a few. 

Media coverage included various press releases and interviews in relation to different events. We also lined up interviews with some high profile chefs and personalities taking part in the festival such as Rachel Allen, Kevin Dundon, Gary O’Hanlon, James Kavanagh, Derval O’Rourke, Jake Carter, Brian Redmond, Edward Hayden, Jess Murphy, Arun Kapil and Nathalie Lennon. 

Results:

We secured over 230 pieces of national and regional coverage across 2023 and 2024.

While we don’t have exact attendee numbers in 2022, it was less than 50,000. There were 57,000 attendees in 2023 and 68,000 attendees in 2024. This is a 19% increase from the previous year.