With almost a quarter of a million people expected over three days, around 1,500 stands, 200 journalists and 40–50 media organisations on site, the Ploughing is much more than an agricultural event. It is one of the biggest media and communications opportunities in the Irish calendar.
Walking the site, Jack speaks to the people competing for that attention and looks at how the way they do it is changing.
Gas Networks Ireland’s Gareth Field explains why humour, creative activations and influencers are helping the organisation reach new and younger audiences, while still recognising the importance of traditional agricultural media.
Sheena Hopper of The Irish Farmers Journal discusses how one of Ireland’s most established agricultural media brands is evolving through digital subscriptions, podcasts and new products, while building on the strong communities that already exist around its journalism.
At Agriland, founder Cormac Farrelly shares how a digital agricultural media start-up grew into a 44-person organisation and became the Ploughing’s livestream media partner, broadcasting nine hours live across the three days.
Jack also meets Brian Dawson of The Electoral Commission to see how voting for Ireland’s favourite cow can turn a complicated subject into something people want to engage with, and joins Irish Times political correspondent Harry McGee to hear what covering one of Ireland’s biggest political gatherings looks like from a journalist’s perspective.
For PR professionals, the episode offers a look at what happens when traditional journalism, digital media, influencers, brands and audiences all meet in the same field.
At the centre of it all is a familiar media relations challenge: when everyone has something to say, how do you get people to stop, pay attention and remember your story?
Transcript:
Jack Murray 0:00
Welcome to a very special episode of Inside Media Relations. I'm Jack Murray. I'm at the 95th edition of the Irish Plowing Championships. Every year, for three days in September, Irish farmers get together to plow a small bit of ground, and there's a huge commercial activation. Over the three days, there'll be almost a quarter of a million people here, and there are brands, there are journalists, there are 1,500 stands, there are 200 journalists, and about 40 to 50 media organizations. So we'll be getting inside media relations. We'll be talking about how do you connect with farmers and what sort of innovative things are happening in the farming media. This year, one in five stands have influencers, and we'll be looking at that, talking to some of the people involved, and getting inside media relations. As I walked through the plowing, I noticed a tattoo parlor in the corner of the Gas Networks Ireland stand. So I dropped in to talk to Gareth Field, communications manager, to ask what it was all about, Gareth, I'm here getting a tattoo in Gas Networks Ireland stand. I suppose tell us a little bit from a communications point of view what being at the Plown Championships means. There's a lot of influencers working this year, in addition to lots of journalists being down there, and a huge audience of rural people here over three days.
Gareth Field 1:20
Well, I think you know the most important thing for us at Gas Networks Ireland is being able to reach out to a predominantly rural audience. We want to kind of engage landowners because we've got 15,000 kilometers of gas network that runs all across the country, and that runs across a lot of farm farmland, and so we've got to do a lot of work and a lot of engagement with landowners, so this is the perfect place for us to be to meet them and to spend the extra time to get to know them.
Jack Murray 1:47
So we were walking outside, and it it completely caught my eye. I saw get a tattoo parlor in the Cast Network. Tell me about this brand activation as a piece of fun, as a way to have conversations.
Gareth Field 2:00
At Cast Network Islands, we've got five big safety campaigns, which Dove Before You Dig is one of them. And we've always found with our campaigns that using humor and being a little bit different, it really helps to cut through, and it helps to really deliver that important safety message. So,
Jack Murray 2:15
just tell me about the mechanics of it, like the creativity behind it, how long it took to plan it, the build here on site.
Gareth Field 2:21
Yeah, well, we've been working on that before you dig for a number of years. We actually came down to plowing last year and we introduced the tattoo parlor, and it was a huge success. We worked with James Doyle, who's a very big influencer. Yeah, good job there to promote us. This year we're working with Sammy TV and we're working with Mary Claire Fitzpatrick, and they've been helping to promote the campaign, so you've been
Jack Murray 2:42
using influencers.
Gareth Field 2:43
Yeah, absolutely. You know
Jack Murray 2:45
what is it? So, like, from a media relations point of view, as media relations people, we're trained in traditional media. You go to where the audience is. So we're here today because there's over three days. It'll be a quarter of a million rural people. How how are the influencers helping you unlock that?
Gareth Field 3:00
Yeah, like for us, traditional media will always be important, and still has a hugely important role to play. Whether it's AgriLand or the Irish Farmers Journal, what's interesting about the influencers is it just takes us into a brand new audience, and it helps us reach the younger people as well. And I think that's really important because you know today's farmers they're getting younger and younger, and you know we want to make sure that they're engaged in important safety messages as well, and with that, we're also doing a lot of work with Macron and Macron Affirmative have been really brilliant in terms of supporting this campaign, and they've got behind it as well, and they're pushing it out to all of the people that they work with, and you know a
Jack Murray 3:34
lot of a lot of the PR people who tune into the podcast are interested in the mechanics of like so as a brand, you're working with an influencer. What what's that like? Like we we we we know well what it's like dealing with like a news editor or a correspondent. What what's it like? You engage with an influencer. You know, you say, look, you'll be working with us for three days. You talk about content types. What's that like?
Gareth Field 3:55
To be honest, in a way, it's kind of no different because the way I view it is, their channel is just as important as, say, Media HQ's channel. You know, like ultimately they're reaching an audience, and we need to work with them. I think what's also really important is that we work with them to make sure that they're creating the content that works for their audience. There's no point just giving them content. We need them to buy into it as well, and we need them to sort of give us their view and their needs. And it needs to be good. Absolutely, it needs to be engaging, but it needs to be natural for their audience, and it needs to be authentic. So I think it's really important when we're working with influencers that they've got buy-in and they're giving us ideas, and we're taking those ideas on board and working with them.
Jack Murray 4:34
Well, thanks. I I didn't think top of my shopping list wasn't that I'd be getting a tattooer today. So thank you very much. You're very welcome. The farmer's journal is always a mainstay of the plowing. I caught up with Sheena Hopper. Communications and Public Affairs Manager to talk about its new branding campaign.
Sheena Hopper 5:06
A lot of the other news brands, they probably don't have as much opportunity as we do with the Farmers Journal to engage with our audience face to face. As big an event as the Plowing Championships, like it's a huge opportunity for us. We have been rolling podcasts for the last number of year. Our farm tech talks is, I think, it's done 2000 episodes at this stage, and we get 50,000 downloads a week on our podcast. We release seven different podcasts a week now. So, podcasts and the the audio media has really, really taken off, and we're using that, I suppose, to bring people into our brand. We have our digital subscriptions, and we're ever evolving our digital product, and we're developing a new app at the moment. And we've got lots of value add products as part of our digital premium subscription. So we pay podcasts. We've got a new Mart Watch, which allows farmers to watch videos back on Mart bids, and all of these are part of our digital subscription. So it's bringing that value back into farmers. We've done a lot of work over the last 18 months. In fact, we've engaged with the Financial Times and Google. We did a big initiative with them last year. So we have developed a roadmap of how we're going to evolve as a whole organization. Yes, like it's a mindset change, and that needed to come across all the team, and we've committed to that, and we're we're already there. Like we are putting out our stories every day in the week. We have our live live blog there, so it's a huge part of what we already do on a day to day basis. We we're looking at community all the time. Like we have a very loyal audience, and when you look at our different audiences, if we take one, I'll give you one or two examples, like our Women in Ag, our Irish Country Living audience. That audience is so loyal. They're a community that come year on year back to our Women in Ag event that we have in October. We're evolving that event and we're engaging with a younger audience as well. So we're developing that community in a new way. Our Farm Tech Talk, which is our longest-standing podcast, we have a really loyal listenership to that, and we're trying to grow that out into a community as well. And we're doing live podcasts, and we do a lot of text messages and engage with that audience in different ways as well. So, yes, it's the next step is to build an audience, but we certainly have that already in tow. This is
Jack Murray 7:24
what it's all about. Imagine building one of the biggest media activations for an audience in the whole country, and probably in Europe, based on digging up dirt with an old tractor. Lots of people come here, as we said, a quarter of million the next three days. They'll never come down here. I have an admission to make. I've been here a few times. This is the first time I've actually saw plowing. Sometimes I see it on television. It's done with great precision. It's a competition, and it's to see who, in different grades and different categories, will be the all Ireland champion of plowing. And that's what the whole commercial festival is built around. A little further along, I came across a curious election for Ireland's favorite cow, being run by the Electoral Commission. I spoke to Brian Dawson, Communications and Public Affairs Manager, to find out what they were doing. I'm here with Brian Dawson. Brian, tell me, tell me about this. We're here at the Plowing Championships, and it's a huge opportunity to reach a farming audience, quarter of a million people. Tell me, I'm going to vote for my my favorite cow. Now we'll go over to the poll. Yeah,
Brian Dawson 8:36
yeah.
Jack Murray 8:36
To tell me a little bit about what you're after today. This is
Brian Dawson 8:38
just obviously it's a bit tongue in cheek. We're we're voting for Ireland's favorite breed of cattle. Yeah, but the kind of serious side to it is we're showing people how to complete a ballot paper properly, how to fill it in, what a ballot paper looks like, what a polling station looks like, and what a real ballot box looks like. So, so
Jack Murray 8:57
getting to this audience, getting to the farming audience, and the numbers are really interesting. That there'll be nearly a quarter of million people here. What's it like as a communications person to be able to reach such a focused audience in such a short space of time? Yeah.
Brian Dawson 9:12
Well, as you say, look, the the footfall is huge, and also it's a spread of people from across the country, from from every county and and and none sometimes, where we have the opportunity to speak to young and old to show, particularly young people, how to vote in a really tangible, hands-on way. So this isn't kind of abstract, you know. What about the creativity
Jack Murray 9:35
that goes into a campaign like this then, or like yeah, like there's like there's a lot of different things going on here to grab people's attention. Yeah, a little bit about that.
Brian Dawson 9:42
Well, you know, you can look around here. We've everything from spin the wheels, karaoke, and obviously the the voting. And what we're trying to do, as you say, we've put a lot of time and effort into to how it looks, to how it feels, because what we want as the electoral commission is to be. On the side of the voter,
and to be really helping the voter out, yeah. So learning how to vote, feeling comfortable with voting-that that voting isn't something. Give
Jack Murray 10:10
you a chance as a communications person. Like one of the challenges in your role as the comms manager is that the subject matter can sometimes be dry. We know this, you know. So like voting for your favorite cow is actually like it's incredible crap when it comes to you know
Brian Dawson 10:25
if if anyone wants to do a podcast on on how to do PRS TV it would be the the the least listened to podcast in the world because it's so intricate so technical but as I say what we're aiming to do is to just make it hands on you know voting is a human activity. It's it's not about the numbers. It's about the people.
Jack Murray 10:46
Yeah and most there stats that if you catch people younger, they get into the pattern. Yeah. Yeah. No.
Brian Dawson 10:50
International experience is that if you can get people voting at a young age, it becomes a habit. Yeah. And not only does it become a habit with them, but they show their kids how to how to vote, and it becomes a sense of community and a sense of pride. About so we're you know from a communications point of view, really aiming to build a relationship with voters.
Jack Murray 11:11
Okay.
Brian Dawson 11:11
So from you know the the kids, the young people don't
Jack Murray 11:14
get a chance like many times during the year to have this sort of a connection with voters. No,
Brian Dawson 11:19
like you know we we look for really good opportunities. We're here at the Plow, and last year we were at Electric Picnic. We we go round to schools, we go to colleges, we go to freshers' weeks, again just to really try and do this kind of hands-on stuff of, you know, voting isn't abstract, democracy isn't abstract. It's about putting your choice on the ballot paper, and it's about choosing who you want to represent you.
Jack Murray 11:43
So before we go, you have the inside track here.
Jack Murray 11:45
Like, what's the smart meeting? No,
Brian Dawson 11:48
you know, this is where we are a strictly impartial body. I, I may have my own personal favorites, but you, you won't get that out of me. And we're the same in elections and referendums because we're the referendum commission. We've taken on the functions of the referendum commission. It's our job to show you how to vote, to support you in voting. But who you vote for, that's entirely your choice. I think the Friesian
Jack Murray 12:10
is going to get my number one.
Brian Dawson 12:11
Well, look, that's your choice, and within the secrecy of the polling booth, it's all your choice. Thanks, Brian. Thank you very much.
Jack Murray 12:29
You can see over my shoulder now. Mihal Martin, the T-shirt, is here. He's given a press conference. Very well positioned there, just at the the logo wall for the Plowman Championships, and he's here starting. with a statement, and then he'll answer questions about the stories of the day, the collected press gathering of cameramen and political correspondents from the national media and content creators as well. But this is a sort of media activation that happens here all the time at the Plowman Championships. AgriLand began 13 years ago as an ambitious startup creating content for farmers. I caught up with its founder Cormac Farrelly to discuss its content partnership with the plowing and its plans for the future. Cormac, you're 13 years and a few weeks old in Agriland. It started as a mad, a mad experiment with you and one journalist, and you're up to 44 staff now. Things must be going really well.
Cormac Farrelly 13:34
Yeah, an overnight success 13 years later, Jack. I suppose. Yeah, we're here today. We're the live stream media partner, the Plowing Championship. This is our 10th year, so it's we're 10 years doing this. It's amazing to think in 2014 we approached Amory, which was a year after we started, about getting having a stand down here, and she actually advised us we're too small, so we'd have to partner with somebody. So as luck would happen, as luck would have it, we partnered with Layli. At the time, Lady were just introducing robotic milking to Ireland, and I thought that synergies between both brands were absolutely brilliant. We got to very quickly get in front of every farmer that was really interested in technology, and so we worked with Lady for two years, and then we went, broke out on our own, and we and we we we got our own stand, and then 10 years ago we took over the live stream. So
Jack Murray 14:28
13 years ago, when you started, and you and I would have had conversations, the the the farming media was quite staid. It was quite stable. It it was, I suppose, ripe for a ripe for an upstart,
Cormac Farrelly 14:41
yeah, and you know, hindsight is 2020. I could say and make myself sound really brilliant that the intention was to take on the Farmers' Journal and you know to to really shake up traditional print media. To be honest with you, I had returned to to the family farm, and I just saw a gap for information. And I just said, you know, is has the digital era? The digital era was passing the agri industry by, and and I was kind of saying, just so many opportunities here, and we need to do something. And like originally, Agriland was meant to actually be a classified ads website. So myself and and and two other guys had set up a company called Media Market, which is now Canter Media, and so we set it up in 2002, and we sold it in 2007. So it was real Celtic Tiger, you know, experience. It was really an enjoyable time, and I suppose that gave me a very good understanding for for media, how media operated, and then where the opportunity for Agriland was. We're the live stream media partner of the plowing. So what does that mean? That means we have a studio built out outside there, and we will be broadcasting live broadcasting for three hours a day for the next three days. So nine hours in total, which is more than any other media organization, including RTE. And it's really funny. I think it's it's it's the thing I love about about digital media and where digital media is going is that you know the team here and a small team of people have the capacity to do this.
Jack Murray 16:08
It's a full-time job training people and making sure that you have the right people in the right place. Yeah,
Cormac Farrelly 16:11
it's that is probably singly our biggest challenge. So right now, every agri news editor operating in Ireland is ex agriland, so you can look at that in two ways: either we're great at identifying talent, or we're terrible at holding on to staff. I'd like to think it's it's it's it's the first or great at identifying talent. Unfortunately, if I owned sports land or business land or some other land that wasn't agri, we would have a queue of journalists teeing up to work for us. The journalists don't, for some reason, they're not that interested in agriculture. I think it's because they think, you know, that they have to be technical. With us, there's a split. There's the news team, and typically they're all fully qualified journalists, and they a lot of them come out DCU, UL, Galway, etc. And then there's the technical team. The technical team are typically ag scientists. Like they're the guys at the point, look at a piece of grass and go, "Well, that's much this is worth, or that's from a point of view, that's much what that's worth. The news team are very much looking, you know, covering international news when it comes to agriculture, so they're looking at stuff like climate change. They're looking at you know carbon emissions. They're looking at water quality. Our ideal headline is a farmer dies. New grant announced because that people love really that they really engage when when when unfortunately when there's when there's a death on a farm and farming is the most dangerous. It's actually the most dangerous dangerous industry in Ireland, so that gets huge engagement. Also, farmers love information; they love understanding. You know, if there's a new grant coming out, what does it mean? Will they are they able to apply? What's involved, etc. etc. But really, what farmers love is they have an insatiable appetite for information and for content. They like they will just literally consume content permanently. We like, for example, we would have as much we have as much traffic from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. as we have from 6 p.m. till 12 a.m.
Jack Murray 18:14
Okay.
Cormac Farrelly 18:15
So you know we know farmers are consuming from 6 p.m. till till till till 12 a.m. Kind of, if you're looking at the analytics, I suppose nerdly I do every now and again, and you'll see 12 a.m. and come and literally just settle just traffic, and it will just fall off a cliff. Yeah, but then because we're getting an awful lot of international traffic, while the Irish farmers are asleep in bed, we have maybe traffic coming from New Zealand or Australia or somewhere else. Yeah. So the site is always busy. Thanks for
Jack Murray 18:41
your time and every success in the future.
Cormac Farrelly 18:43
thanks, Jack.
Jack Murray 18:51
The job of a political correspondent can be particularly varied and interesting at an event like the Plowing Championships. I spoke with my old friend Harry McGee, political correspondent with the Irish Times to find out how his day was going. So, Harry, you're here covering the Plowing Championship today. We started off at the start of the day with Mihal Martin, and you were in the media scrum. Tell us a little bit about when you come to a marking like this. What's expected of you?
Harry McGee 19:15
Yeah, well, the Plowing Championship for us as political correspondent is the first big marking before the dollar returns, so today it has become compulsory for all the political leaders to come down here because it's such a big event. So all the political leaders arrive, they go around, look at the plowing, meet the people, and then they also do what we describe as doorstep interviews-interviews with the media about the big events of the day. So all of the big politicians were here today. The Tishik was here. We all Martin, the Tanishta Simon Harris, the Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou Macdonald, who we just spoke to a few minutes ago, and also the Labor leader Ivanovachic. And as well, the president comes down. She opens the event. She gave a speech. She kind of focused on the environment. She didn't do a an interview with the media per se, and
Jack Murray 20:04
was a bit of that about an overhang from the weekend. She didn't want to get
Harry McGee 20:07
back into it. No, usually the the president doesn't do interviews. When Michael D. Higgins was president, it was rare for him to do a doorstep interview here. He'd make a speech, he'd make his points in his speech, and that would be more or less that. And
Jack Murray 20:20
when you're filing, then and you're reporting, you're filing. I was watching earlier on. You're filing video. You're you're actually reporting and recording. You're you're sending clips in into the newsroom. So you you have a couple of different obligations. Yeah,
Harry McGee 20:34
I'm better at some aspects than others. I I did take some video, but I didn't send any video down. We have a photographer here today. We talk most of the video, but sometimes we will do video. We put in clips, we put up something on social media, and then we will file quickly enough. I've already filed a piece for lunchtime, and then I'll file another piece for later on this afternoon. Really, an omnibus piece, kind of capturing everything that's been said. All of the leaders were asked about Catherine Connolly's sister Margaret, who was involved in the protest against President Trump's visit at the weekend, and who said some outspoken things in an interview with CNN about Gaza and about President Trump and about the U.S. So all of the leaders were asked about the comments and their response to it, and I think the response from all of them was more or less the same: that she was a private citizen, and in a democracy, she was entitled to have her view, and her view were not necessarily reflective of what the president would say in the position that the president now has.
Jack Murray 21:34
Finally, you've fulfilled a lot of different roles in journalism, and every day as a journalist is different. You've edited. You've written. You write opinion columns. You write stuff at the Conner Tribune. You write news pieces. You write analysis pieces. The energy today is different to other days. Which of them is your favorite, or does it matter?
Harry McGee 21:51
I think the pieces I like best are the really long pieces that take a lot of research and that involve a very long narrative story. I mean, I kind of came into political journalism from a feature or from a big story point of view, and even though a lot of our work is kind of day to day and sometimes minute by minute, you know, if something is happening quickly, we're expected to file immediately, and we use a mixture of technology and just kind of speed to get stuff across. So, for example, if there's a fast-breaking news story at the moment, we'll record it using a voice-to-text app, and sometimes we can get the story up and running within nanoseconds. So that's the speed at which we operate. But it's kind of the slow journalism that I still tend to like-the one where you go out, research, you find out, you talk to people, and there's always some really interesting relationships,
Jack Murray 22:44
and you have to dig deeper, and you have to use your gray matter a bit more. Yeah,
Harry McGee 22:48
and then out of it comes a story, and it might be a story in relation to politics, might be a story in relation to human endeavor, it might be a story in relation to you know tragedy or sadness or how people respond. But it involves a lot of work. You're talking to a lot of people, and then you're trying to kind of thread it all together into a bigger story. And that's the kind of stuff that I really love doing. I can't do it all the time because of the exigencies of journalism nowadays. But when I look back and think of the pieces that have given me most satisfaction in all my years as journalists, they're the pieces I do tend to remember.
Jack Murray 23:20
Thank you, Harry. And there it is. What an interesting day! For three days, a field in the Midlands becomes one of the biggest meeting places in Ireland. 1000s of people, hundreds of organizations, all with something to say, and all competing for attention. And walking around, what struck me was the creativity people are using to get noticed, from tattoos and favorite cows to influencers and media partnerships, the channels may be changing, but the challenge remains the same. How do you get people to stop, pay attention, and remember your story? It was great to hang out with journalists for the day. I spent a big part of my career around journalists, and it reminded me while I always enjoy their company, always colorful and never boring. A big shout out to Ciara Byrne who helped me produce this and was an invaluable help on the day. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Please like and subscribe. I'm Jack Murray, and we'll see you again soon when we take another look inside media relations.
