How Three Ireland Brought Connectivity to Arranmore Island
Three Ireland's 'The Island' is a 2019 documentary-led campaign created by Boys and Girls that places Arranmore Island, County Donegal, at the centre of a real-world broadband intervention, using genuine community need to demonstrate the tangible business value of Three's connectivity solutions across the Irish market.
Published in April 2019, the campaign centres on Arranmore, a small island off the northwest coast of Ireland facing population decline and economic hardship. Three Business and Boys and Girls identified the island as a living proof point: by deploying Three's broadband infrastructure to Arranmore, the campaign could show rather than claim what reliable connectivity means for a community and its businesses. The primary vehicle was a nine-minute documentary, supported by shorter films, giving the campaign a narrative depth rarely associated with telecommunications advertising in Ireland.
The campaign's objectives were threefold. First, it aimed to differentiate Three Business from competitors in the Irish enterprise connectivity market. Second, it sought to build emotional credibility for the Three brand among business decision-makers. Third, it intended to generate measurable commercial outcomes — new leads, corporate account growth, and year-on-year revenue increases — from an audience notoriously resistant to conventional advertising. The Arranmore story provided a vehicle that addressed all three simultaneously, anchoring technology claims in a human narrative that Irish audiences could verify and connect with.
The campaign sits within the electronics and technology category and represents one of the most substantively documented Irish advertising efforts of 2019, earning recognition across multiple international award bodies over the following three years. Clapboard rates 'The Island' at 74 out of 100, reflecting its strategic coherence, creative originality, and verified commercial performance.
Three Ireland operates in a competitive Irish telecommunications market where network parity is a persistent strategic problem. Kris Clarkin, Creative Director at Boys and Girls, stated the core tension directly: "The difference between the Three Business team and their main competitors is – according to independent research as well as their own – most of the technology is actually quite similar, but what they have in spades is this personal connection." That insight became the strategic foundation for everything 'The Island' would do.
In Ireland, the business connectivity sector is contested by providers including Vodafone Ireland and Eir, both of whom invest heavily in enterprise communications. When technical specifications converge across competitors, differentiation through rational product claims becomes ineffective. Boys and Girls identified that Three's genuine advantage was relational rather than infrastructural, and that advantage needed to be demonstrated at scale rather than asserted in copy. Arranmore Island gave them a stage where the demonstration could be irrefutable.
According to the GSMA, approximately 5.1 billion people globally held mobile subscriptions at the end of 2018, representing around 67 percent of the world population, and 4G was expected to surpass 50 percent of global mobile connections during 2019. Those figures contextualise the broader technology environment in which Three Ireland was operating: a moment of genuine network expansion where the question was not whether connectivity was available but who it was actually reaching. Arranmore, with its documented population decline and limited digital infrastructure, made that question tangible for Irish business audiences.
Rory Hamilton, Executive Creative Director and Founder of Boys and Girls, described the originating idea to LBBOnline: "When we learnt about an island that was struggling and needed connectivity, we had the idea to bring Three's Business Solutions to Arranmore and showcase the power of the network." The strategic leap was recognising that a real place with a real problem was more persuasive than any constructed brand scenario, particularly for the sceptical business decision-makers Three needed to reach in the Irish market.
Three Ireland's 'The Island' takes its creative form from documentary filmmaking rather than conventional advertising production. The campaign's primary asset is a nine-minute film that follows Arranmore Island, County Donegal, through the practical and human consequences of gaining Three's broadband connectivity, supported by a series of shorter films designed for targeted distribution across the Irish market.
The choice of documentary format was not incidental. It enforced a discipline of truth that product-led telecommunications advertising cannot sustain: every claim made within the film was verifiable because it was happening to real people in a real place. Residents of Arranmore appear as themselves, describing the economic and social conditions that poor connectivity had created and the changes that followed Three Business's intervention. This approach transformed the campaign from an advertisement into a record, and that distinction gave it a credibility with Irish business audiences that conventional campaign formats rarely achieve.
Rory Hamilton, Executive Creative Director and Founder of Boys and Girls, was the driving creative intelligence behind the campaign's strategic and narrative framing, as documented by LBBOnline and Boysandgirls Ie. Kris Clarkin, Creative Director at Boys and Girls, shaped the insight that personal connection, not technical specification, was Three's differentiating asset — a conviction that determined every creative decision, from location selection to interview approach to editorial tone.
Elaine Carey, Chief Commercial Officer of Three UK and Ireland, participated in LBBOnline's retrospective coverage of the campaign, indicating senior client involvement in the campaign's development and subsequent evaluation. The nine-minute film functions as the campaign's anchor, while shorter edits extended reach across digital channels in Ireland. As reported by LBBOnline in a feature published 16 May 2022, the campaign was characterised as having real-world effects that extended well beyond emotional storytelling — a distinction that shaped how the industry assessed its creative effectiveness over the following award cycle. Production credits beyond the named creative leadership at Boys and Girls are not publicly documented in available sources.
Three Ireland's 'The Island' produced verified commercial results across multiple dimensions. According to effie-europe.com, the campaign generated an 18 percent increase in new business leads, a 203 percent growth in corporate-base business, and a 152 percent year-on-year growth for Three Business — figures that position it among the most commercially effective Irish technology campaigns of its era.
The award record is extensive and spans multiple years. As documented by effie-europe.com and Little Black Book, 'The Island' received a Cannes Lions Gold in Creative Strategy in 2021, a Cannes Lions Bronze in Brand Experience and Activation in 2021, and a Cannes Lions Silver in Creative Effectiveness in 2022. The campaign also received an Effie Awards Gold in 2021, as recorded by effie-europe.com. These awards span creative, strategic, and effectiveness categories — a combination that is structurally unusual and reflects the campaign's dual success as both a piece of craft and a commercial instrument.
The three-year award timeline is itself significant. 'The Island' launched in April 2019 and continued accumulating recognition through 2022, which indicates that the campaign's measurable effects were substantial enough to sustain Effie and Cannes effectiveness submissions long after the original launch. For an Irish market campaign targeting a business audience, that longevity is a meaningful indicator of genuine structural effectiveness rather than a short-term awareness spike.
Clapboard rates 'The Island' at 74 out of 100. That score reflects a campaign that achieves genuine alignment between creative form and commercial strategy, demonstrates its claims through real-world action rather than assertion, and produces results that are independently verified through the Effie process. The primary constraint on a higher score is the absence of publicly available media spend or reach data that would allow fuller evaluation of efficiency alongside effectiveness.
Three Ireland's 'The Island' is a 2019 documentary campaign by Boys and Girls focused on Arranmore Island, County Donegal. Three Business deployed broadband connectivity to the island to demonstrate real-world impact on a struggling community, using a nine-minute film as the primary campaign asset across the Irish market.
Boys and Girls created 'The Island' for Three Ireland. The Dublin-based agency, led by Executive Creative Director and Founder Rory Hamilton and Creative Director Kris Clarkin, had held the Three Ireland creative account since 2013, with a three-year contract extension confirmed in April 2018, according to Adworld Ie.
Three Ireland's 'The Island' won a Cannes Lions Gold for Creative Strategy, a Cannes Lions Bronze for Brand Experience and Activation, and a Cannes Lions Silver for Creative Effectiveness, plus an Effie Awards Gold in 2021, all as documented by effie-europe.com and lbbonline.com across the 2021 and 2022 award cycles.
According to effie-europe.com, 'The Island' produced an 18 percent increase in new business leads, 203 percent growth in corporate-base business, and 152 percent year-on-year growth for Three Business. These figures were verified through the Effie Awards process, supporting the campaign's Gold recognition in the 2021 cycle.
Boys and Girls chose Arranmore because it represented a verifiable, real-world case for connectivity's impact. As Rory Hamilton told LBBOnline, the island was struggling and needed connectivity. Its documented population decline made Three's broadband intervention a credible demonstration of business value rather than a constructed advertising claim.
Clapboard rates Three Ireland's 'The Island' at 74 out of 100. The score reflects strong alignment between creative form and commercial strategy, real-world proof of claims, and independently verified Effie-certified results, with the primary limitation being limited publicly available data on media spend and campaign reach.
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