When AIG made the decision in New York to step away from Dublin GAA after a winning decade of partnership, one of the biggest properties in Irish sport was on the market.
There was no shortage of interest but the criteria and the values were important to get right.
In November Staycity Aparthotels were unveiled as the ones to be on the shirts of every Dublin GAA, LGFA and Camogie team for the next five years.
In the first of our new ‘Thursday Interview’ series we sat down with the two men that got the deal over the line Tomás Quinn, the Commercial Director of Dublin GAA and Jason Delany, Director of Brand, Product and Marketing at Staycity.
We cover the motivation, the negotiation and the initial activation in a wide ranging conversation…
You’re coming in off the back of a very successful 10 year partnership that Dublin GAA had with AIG. Dublin GAA is a brilliant sporting brand, probably the biggest in Ireland outside of the international teams.
What was it about that that attracted you? Was it to boost awareness of Staycity? Was it to boost sales, or what was the motivation for getting involved?
Jason Delany: I’ve been in the business since its inception back in 2004, 20 years. So I think over those 20 years you’d feel you are doing a pretty good job. The branding is getting out there. It’s great. But then outside that, you’d get a lot of people saying, Staycity, who are you?
It’s an interesting perspective outside of that, where you think about how good is our brand recognition in Ireland, given that we are here 20 years, and the business has been a real success story.
When this sponsorship opportunity came up, I thought this would be a great chance to really increase the brand visibility for the brand.
We’ve flirted with sport before. We did a lot of work with TG4 back in the day but clearly nothing of this magnitude at all.
Because one of our target audiences is families, we felt with Dublin GAA and the community and what that represents, that this is a great chance for us to connect into that.
Were you a fan?
Jason: Yeah, I played a bit back in the day, with Whitehall Columcilles. My uncle Gerry, he did the accounts for the GAA and he would bring me to some of the big games.
I was at the 12 Apostles game back in 1983 Kieran Duff, Brian Mullins, all the guys. Tommy Drumm was the club captain and Paul Clarke as well.
My son Jamie plays for Fingal Ravens and John O’Leary is his coach.
How has it been for the first few months?
The launch was in November and here we are three, four months later. So, we’re still in the planning stages.
We’ve rocked in when that window’s now much shorter. In an ideal world, it would be a little bit longer. But listen, to be honest with you, we are working with some good partners, and we are getting things done. Tomás has been kind enough to connect me to a lot of the players in the space.
So how did this arise in the first point between the two of you? Where was the first contact?
Tomás Quinn: Jason reached out. He had seen the information that the partnership was still available and he made a call.
It was October, so it was late in the process. We were in advanced discussions with a couple of different brands at that stage. And I think one of the first questions Jason said was, are we too late?
And I think my answer was no, if you can move quickly, but if you have a sign off process of six, eight months, then yes, it is too late.
If we’re in a position to move quickly, then it’d be worth continuing the conversation.
In fairness, we hit it off from the start. The initial call was, nearly an hour and I remember hanging up thinking it felt like there was going to be a good fit there.
So that was a Wednesday and the deal was done within a week. It was that quick. Obviously for a sponsor at this level, that would be unusual. But we were at the stage of a process where we were very clear in terms of what we were looking for in terms of working with a partner.
We had an understanding of what was out there in the marketplace. Again, we had a couple of key factors that we were looking for in a partner and very quickly it was evident that Staycity met all those requirements.
Now the legals and all that stuff had to follow up. But in terms of the deal itself and the essence of it. That was done very quickly.
The value of the deal is a big one, but one of elements that was pleasantly surprising was the duration of it.
Jason: It’s a five-year term and that gives both of us a degree of comfort, a confidence that that we can work this all out and develop the relationship.
It takes me back to the early years of Staycity when we were growing a business. We only had 18 apartments back in 2004. Turnover in the first year was less than 1 million euros.
Turnover for this year is projected to be just over shy of a quarter of a billion euros.
So it’s been quite a jump to see it. And each of those years were learning years.
And I feel with the GAA sponsorship we will learn and grow as well.
Tomás: Our preference was always to try and have that longer relationship. And that’s for our benefit and it’s for the partner’s benefit because you want to be able to show that value.
The reality is the experience we had with AIG would allow us to hopefully not take as long to learn from. What we did together in years one, two, and three were very different to what we were doing in the last few years.
Jason talks about brand awareness and they were all the key things that AIG wanted to do at the start. That evolved then into a wide range of different areas of CSR, Equality and more
I think that’s the exciting thing for us is we have an opportunity to try and do that together. I think three years is just very tight for something of this level and our preference is always to try and look for something longer term and again I think that I think we’ll see the value in that for both parties as the as the partnership progresses.
The content piece that you dropped on Friday was great. In Dublin’s Staycity. Very cool. Who was it that you were working with on that and how important was your first activation in front of the first Championship match of the season?
Jason: Tomás was kind enough to introduce us to the right people who’ve worked in the space with Dublin before and one of them, was Daragh from The Brand Fans. And then he made an introduction into a creative agency called the 10th Man.
So once we established partners that we’re going to work with on that particular piece, along with Dublin GAA, it was down to conceptual.
I’d love to sit here and take all the credit for that, but I’m not going to do that. Cause to be honest with you, when I saw that line ‘In Dublin, Staycity,’ I thought, God, these guys are really, really good and really on the money.
It was put together over probably about six weeks. I think they rocked up outside for the Dublin Tyrone game, just to get that sense of feeling with the fans and things like that.
When that piece went out on Friday, my phone was hopping from colleagues and friends. It was a really proud moment. And we felt it was a nice way to do first contact in with the Dublin fan base and the supporters.
How tight was the timing of the announcement when it came to getting the brand on the jersey with only weeks to Christmas and the start of the season.?
Tomás: So we had a date picked with O’Neill’s probably from March, April time saying mid-November. Six weeks out from Christmas, ahead of Black Friday. So that was in and around the date we had in our head the whole time. So when we were talking to Jason, that was still realistic.
Yes, it was close, but one of the reasons it was realistic is the adaptability of O’Neill’s, the fact that they’re Irish-based, Irish manufacturers, they can turn it around quite quickly.
AIG were going to be there until the 31st of October. You leave it to sit for a week or two, and let them finish off. They had a couple of nice pieces of content that they rolled out to mark a brilliant decade and we wouldn’t get in the way of that.
That relationship with AIG and John Gillick was obviously very strong as well. Have you met him as part of this?
Jason: Yeah. I did on a couple of occasions. Tomás connected me.
Incredibly nice chap, I have to say. He kept me calm in those vital moments, giving me some pointers about what to expect.
Tomás: He’s a really good guy and I’ll still be tapping into him.
Partnerships or sponsorships they’re built on relationships and the ability to communicate.
We want Staycity in this instance but any partner we have, to at the end of year one or year two to be happy things worked really well and happy to continue growing together.
It was worthwhile for the boys to sit down and have a conversation because there’s stuff from the sponsor side that he’ll be able to share with Jason on the demands and on the stuff that’s going to come in that we mightn’t see.
From staff internally, never mind externally, what challenges you have, like everyone will just assume you’ve accessed to a constant supply of magical tickets and how you manage that.
One of the things that AIG did very well and which you’ve started out down that path as well, even evidenced by today is that, you know, this is one partnership, four codes. We do a lot around equality in sport and Dublin was always a kind of a stretch benchmark for other counties. How important was it for that to continue?
Jason: A hundred per cent, yeah. I have three daughters and we went to the Ladies game in Parnell Park when they played Galway earlier in the leagues. Honest to God, like, that stadium was fairly rocking, fairly full on.
Tomás: That’s a huge plus for us. It is fundamental with Dublin GAA in terms of what we did with AIG in that space.
We met a number of brands last year where I was surprised and disappointed with one or two not committed to that.
The conversations ended pretty quickly after that to be perfectly honest. There’s a huge amount of work has gone on in the industry, but there’s still a way to go. To be honest we wouldn’t have even considered it for a second.
Tell us a little about Staycity.
Jason: So we have 5,300 apartments now. When we started, as I said, back in 2004, we had 27.
I have a background in hotel management, so a lot of my friends thought I’d lost the plot.
You’re going to where? But I thought, no, there’s something here that’sa little bit different to a standard hotel room.
One of our first big accounts was the cast and crew of Riverdance, which kept us going for a whole summer.
When they were doing the Port Tunnel Jacobs Engineering were here for quite a spell, like over a year. With the bedroom and the kitchen that makes a real positive difference.
So there’s good base business here, and then to add on top of that, you had your midweek stays, and then you had your leisure coming in at the weekends.
We survived the financial crash and Covid and we have kept on growing.
It’s a testament to the staff and to Tom, our CEO who founded the business with his brother Ger back in 2004.
We are an Irish company, our roots are in the Liberties, and our head office just faces Teelings Whiskey Distillery.
We have 130 staff at head office, and across the properties It is just in excess of 400 for Ireland and then outside beyond that, it’s just over 1200.
We’ve two brands Staycity Aparthotels, which is our core brand and then we launched a premium brand six years ago called Wilde inspired by Oscar Wilde.
So we have six Wilde properties at the moment and the next 10 openings are under that name as well. And we feel off the back of the sponsorship, we’re now looking at active sites in Cork, Galway and Belfast.
So that’s it. One simple phone call, one quick execution of a deal and now we have a brand new entrant to the sponsorship market with one of the biggest sporting brands there is.
Lots more to come on this as we follow the activation over the coming years…
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