How GAA and BBDO Made the First Timer Feel at Home in Irish Sport
GAA's "First Timer" is a single-asset film campaign created by BBDO Dublin, published in Ireland in May 2019, designed to welcome newcomers into Gaelic games by centering the emotional experience of encountering Irish sport for the very first time.
The Gaelic Athletic Association occupies a singular position in Irish cultural life. It is not merely a sporting body but a community institution woven into the rhythms of towns and parishes across Ireland. The "First Timer" campaign, launched as part of BBDO Dublin's newly established GAA brand platform in 2019, addresses a strategic tension the association increasingly faces: how to preserve the deeply traditional character of Gaelic games while signalling genuine openness to those who did not grow up inside the culture. The campaign's answer is an emotional film that places a first-time observer at the centre of the story, inviting audiences to rediscover the sport through fresh eyes.
Published in Ireland in May 2019, the campaign sits at the opening of the GAA's summer championship season, a period when the sport commands its largest national audience and when the imagery of Croke Park, the sliotar, and the hurley carries its greatest cultural resonance. The timing is deliberate. By launching during the championship window, BBDO Dublin positions the GAA not only as a competition but as a community ritual that anyone can join. The campaign's use of the hashtag GAABelong underlines this ambition, connecting the film to a broader platform promise of radical welcome. As a single-film asset, "First Timer" concentrates its entire argument into one uninterrupted emotional arc, a structural choice that demands creative precision and rewards attentive viewing.
BBDO Dublin was appointed as GAA's creative agency of record in December 2018, according to reporting by adsoftheworld.com. The agency's first act was to construct a unified brand platform, launching "Where We All Belong" as the overarching creative framework in 2019, per adsoftheworld.com. "First Timer" is the inaugural expression of that platform, meaning it carries the weight of establishing a new brand voice for one of Ireland's most recognised institutions.
The strategic insight driving the campaign is grounded in a tension familiar to legacy sports organisations across Europe. Established codes like hurling and Gaelic football carry intense communal loyalty among those born into them, yet can feel opaque or unwelcoming to outsiders, including new Irish residents, urban dwellers with weakened parish ties, and children of mixed cultural backgrounds. In Ireland, where demographic change has accelerated through successive waves of inward migration, this is not an abstract marketing challenge but a live social question. By framing the newcomer's perspective as the emotional anchor, BBDO Dublin converts a potential barrier into a creative asset, making unfamiliarity itself the engine of wonder and connection.
The competitive context in Irish sports media in 2019 is instructive. Guinness had already demonstrated the power of community-centred sports storytelling with its "Behind Every Great Town" campaign, launched in August 2017 for the All-Ireland Championships and featuring real volunteers from Castlegregory, Co. Kerry, as reported by Little Black Book. That campaign set a high benchmark for authentic, people-first sports advertising in Ireland. Against that precedent, "First Timer" pursues a complementary but distinct register, foregrounding the novice rather than the devoted, and building its emotional argument around the GAABelong platform rather than heritage or sacrifice. The GAA's primary institutional competitor for discretionary leisure time in Ireland includes Soccer's Football Association of Ireland and Rugby's Irish Rugby Football Union, both of which have invested in brand campaigns targeting younger and more diverse audiences during this period.
Lorcan Hynes directed "First Timer" for production company Red Rage, working from a script by copywriter Des Kavanagh and under the creative direction of Executive Creative Director Dylan Cotter at BBDO Dublin, with art direction by Rob Murray, as documented by adsoftheworld.com and clapboard.com.
The film's creative approach, as characterised by the archive description on thecreativesroom.com, centres on emotional storytelling focused on inclusion, community spirit, and Irish sport. That framing points to a specific creative discipline: the restraint required to let an emotional journey unfold without over-explaining it. A first-timer narrative lives or dies on the authenticity of its observational detail. The iconography of Gaelic games — the distinctive shape of the hurley, the hard leather of the sliotar, the noise and scale of Croke Park on a championship afternoon — must land as discovery rather than lecture. Hynes's task is to calibrate that balance, presenting the textures of Irish sport as a world both vivid and accessible.
The production team is completed by producer Andrew Counihan at Red Rage, with account management led by Caitriona Ní Laoire as Head of Account Management and Alma Mannion as Account Manager at BBDO Dublin, per clapboard.com. The single-asset structure — one film, no supporting print or digital extensions documented in the public record — places the entire creative burden on the film's internal pacing and emotional logic. This is a high-risk, high-clarity approach. It leaves no room for a secondary execution to clarify or amplify the message; the film must function as a complete argument. The GAABelong hashtag provides the film's connective tissue to the broader platform, linking an individual emotional experience to a collective community promise without requiring additional creative assets to make that connection legible.
No verified performance data for "First Timer" is publicly available. No sales lift figures, market-share change data, or documented results have been identified across publicly accessible sources. The campaign also does not appear in the winners or shortlist records of major award shows including Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards, per clapboard.com's research. The Clapboard Score for "First Timer" is 63 out of 100, a rating that reflects competent and purposeful craft without exceptional distinction across the platform's evaluative framework.
Structural analysis offers a more nuanced read. The campaign arrives at a moment of genuine strategic importance for the GAA: the first creative output from a newly appointed agency of record, built around a freshly articulated brand platform. In that context, "First Timer" functions less as a standalone campaign and more as a proof of concept — a demonstration that BBDO Dublin can translate the GAABelong platform promise into emotionally coherent film. The choice to anchor the film in a universal human experience, encountering something unfamiliar and finding it beautiful, is structurally sound. It does not require prior knowledge of hurling or Gaelic football to generate an emotional response, which extends the film's potential reach beyond the GAA's existing audience in Ireland.
The campaign's limitations are structural rather than executional. A single film asset, without documented amplification across digital, social, or out-of-home channels, constrains the platform's ability to build sustained brand-level change. BBDO Dublin's subsequent GAA work, including "When It's Club, It Lives Forever" in November 2019 as reported by adsoftheworld.com, suggests the agency recognised this and moved quickly to deepen the platform's creative breadth.
GAA's "First Timer" is a film campaign created by BBDO Dublin and published in Ireland in May 2019. It forms part of the GAABelong brand platform and uses emotional storytelling to welcome newcomers into Gaelic games, centering the experience of encountering Irish sport for the very first time.
Lorcan Hynes directed the First Timer film for production company Red Rage. The campaign was created by BBDO Dublin, with Executive Creative Director Dylan Cotter, copywriter Des Kavanagh, and art director Rob Murray leading the creative team, as documented by adsoftheworld.com and clapboard.com.
GAABelong is the GAA's overarching brand platform, established by BBDO Dublin after the agency was appointed creative agency of record in December 2018. First Timer is the platform's inaugural film, expressing a promise of inclusion and community welcome that runs across subsequent GAA campaigns throughout 2019.
First Timer does not appear in the winners or shortlist records of major award shows including Cannes Lions, D&AD, The One Show, the Effies, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards, per clapboard.com's research. The campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100.
BBDO Dublin used a first-timer's perspective to address a strategic challenge facing the GAA in Ireland: making Gaelic games feel genuinely open to people outside the traditional parish-based culture. Ireland's changing demographics made this a live social question, and the newcomer's sense of discovery became the campaign's emotional engine.
Croke Park, the sliotar, and the hurley serve as the visual and cultural anchors of the film, representing the distinctive world of Gaelic games that a first-timer encounters. These iconic elements are presented as objects of discovery rather than symbols of exclusion, reinforcing the GAABelong platform's inclusive intent.
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