The All Ireland Final is the main stage of the year for the three primary sponsors of the Football Championship to show off their wares and their marketing smarts.
Croke Park yesterday was ground central for the rebranding of eir, the company formerly known as Eircom.
Since Thursday we had seen the stirring ads appearing on television and online, including a controversial drop shot over Skellig Michael in Kerry.
On Sunday every element of the branding had been changed, using smart colours to stand out in pitchside advertising, and appearing as the new brand in the match programme unlike on the match tickets.
This will have been a complex project and it worked in terms of capturing the imagination.
eir have also sponsored the Fanpic which will be released later this evening and will be shared across social media by tens of thousands of those who were in the ground, looking drenched 10 minutes into the Senior final.
AIB were in the first year of their sponsorship and scored through having Paul Flynn and James O’Donoghue as the stars of their advertising. It gave a timely relevance to the stings shown on the big screen and they will also benefit from the seamless running into Club from Inter County Championships over the coming weeks.
Supervalu stayed with their campaign theme this year of money spent in local stores going back to a much greater extent into the local community.
Bernard Brogan has been the main front man for this campaign and again his selection made it a timely promotional message to be broadcasting out on the big screens.
Each of the brands will monitor their own brand scores and look for spikes associated to their partnership with this biggest occasion in the Irish sporting calendar.
Dublin delivers more in terms of numbers than having any other county in the final and the victory will ensure more of the same early in the year through 2016.
The GAA is one of the few global sporting organisations of any significant stature that eschews during and gaming sponsors from its biggest marquee events. As such it has shown that it is possible to survive without them. The ways in which the existing sponsors react now to the review of the season will determine how easy or challenging it will be for the Croke Park team to rook at renewals for more of the same…
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