EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum is an interactive experience celebrating the positive impact Irish people have had and continue to have on the world. While the Irish have an awareness around the world that outweighs the small population, few countries struggle as much from misrepresentation, outdated stereotypes, or the “Disneyfication” of their culture. Much of this stems from anti-Irish sentiment coming out of the post-famine mass emigration to the USA, Australia, UK, and beyond.

Amongst an incredibly competitive visitor attraction landscape in Dublin and a category still grappling with low visitor numbers as a result of the pandemic, EPIC wanted to capture the attention of both local and international visitors and convince them to visit the museum. Ultimately, we wanted to remind people what EPIC stands for, start a discussion on what it truly means to be Irish, and get visitors to put us on their consideration list.

Data, in its raw form, can only command so much attention and lacks an emotional impact. It’s one thing to illuminate the public to these search terms, but we know that evoking a true emotional response needed another creative layer. Working closely with a skilled CGI artist, several iterations of our Paddy character emerged. Our process and journey involved ensuring each feature of his appearance tied back to a negative predictive search data suggestion.

The challenge was finding the best way to embody terms like “fighting”, “holding a grudge”, “drinking” or “loving potatoes”. We were able to capture all these undesirable qualities through appearance, expressions, body language, and clothing.

Starting with the assumption that damaging generalisations of the Irish still exist, we had the thought of consulting search engines. We knew predictive search terms reflect results based on what the world is searching. What we found was striking and unflattering reflections of the Irish identity.

Comparing results to other developed countries around the world, we found that positive sentiment was more prevalent in all other cases searched. Ireland was carrying the burden of old, harmful stereotypes much more than any other country.

We looked at these negative terms, populated after typing “the Irish are known for…” and found “drinking (158,000,000 results)”, “...fighting (178,000,000 results)...”, “having a temper (7,280,000 results)...”, “...potatoes (67,300,000 results)...” “...holding grudges (725,000 results)...” and worked closely with a CGI animator to interpret those results into a fully-realised “Paddy McFlaherty”.

Paddy caused widespread debate online and amongst radio and TV show hosts. Importantly, most people understood EPIC’s point: Paddy wasn’t a real representation of modern Ireland and anyone who thought so should pay their museum a visit.

During the campaign period, EPIC’s brand awareness jumped 20% - significantly higher than the average increase of 9% amongst the competitive set. They experienced their busiest month ever in July with a 7% jump in visitor numbers vs peak pre-pandemic 2019 numbers and - impressive given the market was down -11%. Web visits (+99.21%), new web users (+97.48%), page views (+80.45%) also increased dramatically.

Search engines might be slow to change their output on who the Irish are, but at least tourists visiting Ireland now know for themselves that their suggestions don’t accurately represent us. Hopefully one day there’ll be a more favourable set of Irish descriptors popping up in predictive search.