Aaron Poole, Marketing Insights Manager, PML Group with this week’s Out \ Look on Out of Home.
Ireland may not be at this summer’s World Cup, but Paddy Power has found plenty of teams for Irish fans to get behind. Live across Outdoor this cycle, the brand’s latest campaign on home turf turns the country’s absence from the tournament into a public conversation, finding Irish reasons to care in the rivalries, connections and running jokes that surround World Cup football.
That thought gives the campaign its bite. Rather than treating the World Cup as a straightforward sporting occasion, Paddy Power leans into the humour, rivalry and slightly irrational logic that surrounds tournament football in Ireland. “Go Panama”, “Support Uruguay”, “Viva Brazil” and “Come On Turkey” are not neutral messages of support. They are small acts of football mischief, delivered with the confidence of a brand that knows exactly how its audience talks.
Speaking about the thinking behind the campaign, Leah Spears, Paddy Power Marketing Director, said: “Like the rest of Ireland, our hopes, holiday plans, and in our case, advance media bookings, were banking on Ireland qualifying for the World Cup. When we blew that, another door opened for creating mischief at scale. We seized the opportunity to show Irish fans still had skin in the game and, instead of everyone there claiming to be Irish, we turned the tables by hitching our wagon to every nation bar England, while also taking the opportunity to roast our wonderful colleague Dan in the process.
“We are delighted to partner with our media agency Zenith, and media partners Source, to bring entertainment to football fans around the country.”
From a media planning perspective, Leah Hughes, Business Director at Zenith, added: “For this year’s World Cup, our challenge was clear: how do we make Irish fans care about a tournament that stings so much not being part of? The answer was to find the Irishness within it. By uncovering the connections between Ireland and the competing nations, from shared heritage and cultural ties to the rivalries, banter and tongue-in-cheek narratives in a way only Paddy Power can bring to life, we created a reason for the Irish fans to stay invested.”
The campaign is built around a simple creative system, but one with enough range to stay fresh across repeated encounters. With 14 creative lines running across 10 Outdoor formats, the work uses scale and variety to keep the joke moving, from large roadside and digital placements to transport, bus shelter and airport environments. Each execution gives Irish fans another reason to pick a side, even when the national team is watching from home.
Large roadside formats carry the bigger, punchier tournament lines at scale, while bus shelters and transport formats bring the work closer to the everyday rhythm of the city. On Supersides and Transvision, the campaign feels like it is moving through the same streets, commutes and conversations as the fans it is speaking to.
The airport work, created by the Paddy Power team, gives the idea another layer. “Forgot your passport?” turns the setting itself into part of the joke, landing in a space where World Cup travel, missed chances and Irish football fatalism all make perfect sense. It is exactly the kind of copy that earns its place in Outdoor: immediate, public, readable in seconds and sharper because of where it appears.
What makes the campaign work is that it does not try to manufacture interest in the tournament from the outside. It taps into something already live in Irish culture. Every World Cup without Ireland creates its own temporary loyalties, running jokes and borrowed allegiances, and Paddy Power has put that behaviour into the physical world. Outdoor gives those jokes scale but also makes them feel communal. The campaign is less a set of ads than a national group chat played out across roadside, transport and airport environments.
For a brand built on sporting tension and quick wit, that public setting matters. Paddy Power’s copy is designed to be noticed, repeated and shared, but its first job is to land in the moment. Whether seen at a bus stop, on a digital roadside screen, on transport or inside the airport, the work catches people in the same real-world contexts where football talk naturally happens.
The campaign was planned by Zenith and delivered across OOH by Source out of home, with creative by Core and the Paddy Power brand marketing team. Recent PML Group iQ research has shown the value of creative and contextual relevance on Outdoor, particularly when copy connects with the audience’s mindset, surroundings or behaviour. Paddy Power’s World Cup campaign is a strong example of that principle in practice, using OOH not simply as a media channel, but as a public stage for a joke Irish football fans already understand.
Outdoor Takes the Temperature of Summer
Summer is never just a date in the calendar. In Ireland, it is usually something closer to a live update – sun one minute, rain the next, lunch plans being rethought, SPF suddenly feeling urgent and something chilled looking very tempting by mid-afternoon.
Live across Outdoor this cycle, three campaigns from CeraVe, Casillero del Diablo and Ferrero Ice Cream show how brands are using that shifting summer context as part of the creative itself. Each campaign does it in a different way, but the common thread is that when the message can respond to the weather, the moment or the mindset, Outdoor becomes much more than a place to carry a poster.
For CeraVe, the relevance is immediate. Its suncare campaign appears across retail and mall digital environments, including Adshel Live Retail, iVision and M-Vision formats, with copy built around “Suncare you want to wear.” The creative brings temperature and UV conditions into the message, pairing product benefit with a clear real-world prompt. LIVEPOSTER-enabled messaging enables such as “19°C” and “Very high UVA/UVB protection” means the campaign does not need to work too hard to explain why the product matters. The weather is doing some of that work already.
That is particularly useful in retail environments, where the distance between seeing the ad and acting on it can be very short. CeraVe’s campaign sits in places where shoppers are already in a buying mindset, with Boots availability brought directly into the creative. It is a neat use of dynamic Outdoor via a practical connection between the conditions outside, the product need and the shopper’s next possible action.
Casillero del Diablo takes the summer cue in a different direction. Its latest campaign uses Digital 48 sheets, Tesco Digiscreens and Digitowers to bring “Summer Time” into off-trade and retail settings, with LIVEPOSTER-enabled temperature-led creative appearing close to purchase. The line works because it does not depend on a perfect blue-sky version of summer – whether the screen is showing 14 or 24 degrees the message still lands as a seasonal nudge, asking people to think about wine through the lens of the moment they are in.
That contextual layer is supported by more classic brand work across the campaign, including “Tastes Heavenly” and “Devilishly Refreshing” executions. The dynamic copy gives the campaign immediacy while the wider creative platform keeps the brand world intact. In retail and off-trade environments that mix is especially valuable, bringing together mood, occasion and availability in a way that feels natural to the setting.
Ferrero’s Kinder Bueno Ice Cream Cones activity brings a more playful take on the same summer instinct. The campaign includes dynamic and motion creative across digital formats, alongside standard elements on formats including Bus Shelters, Adshel Live Retail, Superside and 6 Sheets. Where CeraVe leans into practical relevance and Casillero into seasonal occasion, Kinder Bueno Cones leans into impulse, appetite and the small excuses people give themselves during the day.
The copy system has enough range to match those moments. “Raining again? Grab some sunshine”, “Out of office ON”, “Lunch break upgraded”, “3pm but elevated” and “It’s not lunchtime. It’s Bueno time” all speak to familiar summer behaviours without needing summer to be perfect. That is probably the most Irish part of the whole thing – ice cream is not only for heatwaves; it is for the lunch break, the wet afternoon, the office escape and the small treat that makes the day feel a bit less ordinary.
The standard creative also earns its place, with product-led executions such as “So creamy! So crispy!” giving the campaign simple appetite appeal at scale. That combination of broad product visibility and sharper contextual copy helps the campaign stretch across different environments and mindsets, from mall screens to roadside and transport formats.
Taken together, the three campaigns show the value of Outdoor when it is planned around the world people are actually moving through. Dynamic creative does not always have to mean a big technical reveal. Sometimes it is simply about making the message feel live, useful or better timed. Temperature, UV levels, rain, daypart and proximity to purchase all give the creative a reason to be there.
Outdoor’s advantage here is not just that it can be dynamic; it is that its context is already live. These campaigns meet people in the places where summer decisions are made – in retail spaces, near shops, on the commute, around lunch breaks and at the point where a passing thought can become an action. For CeraVe, that means making SPF feel immediate. For Casillero del Diablo, it means turning the weather into an occasion cue. For Kinder Bueno Cones, it means making a small treat feel right for the moment.
CeraVe was planned with Starcom and Source out of home; Casillero del Diablo with Javelin and Source out of home, with creative by LeShop; and Ferrero Ice Cream’s Kinder Bueno Cones activity with dentsu and PML, with creative by Tag.
