Painting the town red with An Post...

Love them or hate, but you'll find it hard to ignore them.

Today we at Target McConnells launched the first of numerous big campaigns this year, by painting the town red for An Post. Reaction to changing the colour of our seemingly beloved postboxes was predictably mixed, but certainly brought a lot of attention to the campaign!

We’ve all learned about the Rising and know the broad strokes of the stories. But we see history through a black and white tint, and thus find it difficult to really connect with it fully. The onus on us as an agency was to bring history to life, by creating something that’s never been done before, a chance to ‘witness history’ right on the same spot as it occurred 100 years ago, seeing it through the eyes of various protagonists, but through your smartphone.

A first of its kind execution in Ireland, the campaign uses 10 freshly painted red An Post postboxes dotted around Dublin city centre to tell forgotten stories from the rising in an interactive way. Instructions on the postboxes will ask users to FREETEXT a code to 50100. In return they will receive a short video to their phone. This content will then take them back in time to meet a character from the Rising to witness exactly what happened on that very street 100 years ago.

A wide team of TMCC and An Post people worked long and hard on this campaign, and we think it's a fitting way to tell some of the forgotten stories of 1916, including the shooting of a boy on Grafton Street, the British view of the Mount Street Massacre, and of course what happened at the GPO.
Hopefully you do too!

For more, see the Irish Times piece here, or the full site here.

And keep an eye out for more postboxes around Dublin soon!

Shane O'Leary
Senior Planner (Comms & Experience)
Target McConnells