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Cadw

Making a Portrait of a Saint

In January 2019, Cadw tasked Equinox with driving mass awareness around Cadw sites on Wales’s most patriotic day of the calendar year — St David’s Day.

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Activity needed to target pan-Wales and national media — with the main aim of driving site visits and new member registrations, all while positioning Cadw’s historic monuments as an intrinsic part of the Welsh tourism offer during Wales’s official Year of Discovery.

     Tactics​

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  • Devised a creative PR stunt and used St David’s Day (March 01) as a news hook to help drive conversations around Welsh heritage and raise awareness of Cadw sites.

 

  • Partnered with Welsh artist, Nathan Wyburn, to create a gigantic land-art portrait of Wales’s patron saint out of garden bark and 1,000 fresh daffodils.

 

  • Selected St Davids Bishop’s Palace for the portrait’s location, for context.

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  • Captured time-lapse and drone footage of the portrait being created as part of a PR package, which was pitched to media under embargo for March 01.

 

  • Arranged a media call event and issued a diary marker to press, offering print and broadcast journalists an exclusive ‘first look’ at the finished portrait.

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  • Released and digitally advertised time-lapse footage of the portrait with a membership discount code — to encourage site visits and drive new membership sales.

 

  • Created bespoke retail products (featuring aerial photography of the finished portrait) for sale at sites and online — less than 12 hours after portrait completion.

     Results

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  • Generated the most used St David’s Day story across UK and Ireland — enabling Cadw to ‘own’ St David’s Day 2019 in the media sphere.

 

  • Achieved a total PR OTS of 21m, with 167 pieces of Wales-wide and national coverage, including BBC Online, Western Mail, Mail Online and Express Online.

 

  • Secured UK national broadcast coverage on ITV News at Ten as well as numerous pan-Wales broadcast items, including S4C Heno, ITV Wales News at Six and BBC Radio Good Morning Wales.

 

  • Multimedia content generated 85k+ views, 900+ shares, 5k+ reactions and a reach of 126k.

 

  • Increased visitors to St Davids Bishop’s Palace on St David’s Day by 215% vs. the site average on March 01 over the last 9 years.

 

  • Increased Cadw membership sales by 681% vs. same period LY.

 

  • Helped raise awareness of Cadw sites across Wales and the wider UK on Wales’s most patriotic day of the year.

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