The Public House and PHD Media has launched a new integrated campaign for FBD Insurance to help support and fuel the ambitions of Irish businesses across the country.
Now in its third year, the campaign continues FBD Insurance’s commitment to support Irish businesses in a meaningful way. This year’s campaign, titled ‘Fuelling Business Dreams’ features 14 SMEs from across Ireland, each receiving bespoke advertising designed to help them reach their next milestone.
From independent cafés and specialist salons to family-run enterprises, the ads give each business its own platform to tell their own story. Across radio, press, digital, social and VOD each execution was uniquely crafted to encourage audiences to visit, book, buy, sign up and support local.
But while the campaign celebrates 14 Irish businesses on OOH, on screen and on air, it also quietly supported another behind the scenes.
The Public House and FBD Insurance commissioned Irish illustrator Lauren O’Neill to handcraft bespoke dreamscape illustrations for every business featured in the campaign — making Lauren’s business, in many ways, the campaign’s 15th SME.
Over the course of ten weeks, Lauren handcrafted each business owner’s portrait and brought their dreams to life - adding warmth, humanity and a personal feel to every execution.
Lauren added“ 'Dreaming is a very creative, human thing. Everyone featured in this campaign had the imagination and ambition to grow their business, traits that AI doesn’t have on its own. It was so nice to be asked to capture that - the storytelling and characters that this project highlights made it a dream brief for me!’
Nicola Ging, Senior Marketing Manager at FBD Insurance said: “Supporting Irish businesses has been at the heart of FBD for the last 50 years. With this campaign, we wanted to make sure that the support felt real and tangible by helping the SMEs reach new customers and continue growing their businesses."
Paul Kinsella, Senior Art Director at The Public House, added: “So much business advertising looks and feels the same. With this campaign we very deliberately took a bespoke, handcrafted approach. Not just because it’s the most genuine way of visualising real people’s dreams, but because it was also a way of actually supporting them.”
The Public House mantra is “Boring Doesn’t Sell”. With B2B identified as the most boring offender in advertising (according to Peter Field & System One 78% of all B2B advertising is considered ‘dull’), the agency did everything possible to entertain as well as inform on this project - another example of The Public House anti-formula approach to building attention-grabbing work that is anything but boring.
