Radio ads boost Lep Inn’s business

It’s not very often that you hear a pub advertising its wares on national radio but The Leopardstown Inn has done just that through Newstalk as part of a nationwide campaign to bring punters to its beer pumps.

And for the ‘Lep Inn’s’ proprietor Brian Reddy it’s proved successful.

“We’ve been doing it for two or three years now,” he says, “I find that if you take an ad in the Indo or the Irish Times or the local papers it all gets lost and there’s not much reaction from it. The papers are not as popular as they were as we’re going downhill from the point-of-view of there being so much out there now in different forms of media.”

Brian has got great feedback from people over the 30-second Newstalk ad.

“We get a lot of parties and functions out of it,” he says, adding that it’s possible to get a radio campaign for under €5,000.
It’s an unusual route for a publican to take and hasn’t been done very often before so what made him think of it?“Because it’s a medium that works well. You want to have something special to sell such as our revolving cocktail bar, a special offer of some kind.”

He intends running another campaign later in the year. In fact he’d like to run one every three months with a format change, perhaps, for the 30-second spots.

The Leopardstown Inn also gets involved in Facebook and has its own website.

“If you’ve functions or parties or dinners or specials we find it works for us because it gets through instantly to the customer. Newstalk has more listeners than the Irish Times has readers. If you put an ad in the Irish Times on a Monday or Tuesday some 50,000 readers might see it across the whole country whereas we’d have our ads being heard by far far more people,” he claims, “It works well but you’ve got to have catchy ads. The more you spend the more you’ll get from them.”

It will be interesting to see how the Dublin Does Fridays campaign has fared on that basis.