Tourism Ireland Positions the Island as the True Home of Halloween
Tourism Ireland's Home of Halloween is a 2024 travel campaign created by Publicis London that positions the island of Ireland as the ancient birthplace of Halloween, tracing the holiday's origins to the Celtic festival of Samhain and inviting international audiences to experience its living traditions firsthand across 12 overseas markets.
The campaign launched on 12 September 2024, with a 60-second hero film as its centrepiece. That film makes an argument as old as the island itself: Halloween did not begin in North America or in the popular imagination of costume retailers. It began in Ireland, more than 2,000 years ago, when the Celtic festival of Samhain marked the end of the harvest season and the passage into winter. According to Tourism Ireland, the Celts believed the veil between the living and the dead grew thinnest at this time of year. Bonfires were lit, costumes were worn to ward off spirits, and offerings were made to appease otherworldly beings. Those rituals are not merely historical artefacts. In Ireland today, they animate some of Europe's most distinctive autumn festivals.
The campaign highlights three flagship events. The Púca Festival, running from 30 October to 2 November in County Meath, reimagines ancient Samhain traditions through music, fire displays, storytelling, and seasonal food. In Northern Ireland, Derry Halloween — staged from 28 to 31 October — is recognised as Europe's largest Halloween festival, featuring street parades, haunted trails along the city's 400-year-old walls, and fireworks. The Bram Stoker Festival, held from 31 October to 3 November, celebrates the Irish author of Dracula through outdoor spectacles, choral performances, and theatrical productions. Together, these events transform a cultural claim into a concrete itinerary, giving potential visitors a reason to book rather than simply to admire.
Produced by Tiny Ark and directed by Leonn Ward, the hero film was distributed across television, cinema, and digital channels in 12 international markets, supported by cutdowns and campaign photography. The Clapboard Score for the Home of Halloween campaign is 79 out of 100, reflecting strong creative distinctiveness and strategic clarity.
Tourism Ireland entered the 2024 autumn season with a sharply defined strategic brief. The objective was not to promote Ireland generically but to own a single, globally legible cultural moment — Halloween — by rooting it in verifiable Irish heritage. That distinction matters in a competitive destination-marketing environment where rivals including VisitBritain and Fáilte Ireland's domestic campaigns compete for similar audiences and comparable travel windows.
The strategic rationale draws on a documented shift in Tourism Ireland's communications approach. According to Tourism Ireland, the organisation moved from broad destination-recovery messaging in the years following the pandemic toward an advocacy-led platform built around people, culture, and storytelling. The Home of Halloween campaign sits firmly within that evolved framework, using Samhain's 2,000-year-old Celtic roots as proof of a cultural depth that no manufactured destination brand can replicate.
The broader market context reinforces the ambition. Global international tourism arrivals reached approximately 1.4 billion in 2024, recovering to approximately 99 percent of 2019 pre-pandemic volume, according to reporting sourced from globenewswire.com. The global destination-marketing sector was valued at approximately US$155.2 billion in 2024 and is forecast to reach US$513.1 billion by 2034, representing a compound annual growth rate of 12.7 percent, according to futuremarketinsights.com. In Ireland, that competitive pressure is acute: the island must differentiate itself not on scale or price but on irreplaceable cultural specificity.
The campaign's strategic architecture reflects that understanding. By anchoring the Halloween narrative to named, dateable, bookable events — the Púca Festival in County Meath, Derry Halloween in Northern Ireland, the Bram Stoker Festival in Dublin — Publicis London converted a heritage claim into a performance-oriented travel proposition. Strategy Director Adam McGlashan and Senior Strategist Dalonie Graham are credited with shaping that brief, supported by Strategist Rosie Mahoney. The result is a campaign that functions simultaneously as brand storytelling and as a direct stimulus to autumn travel consideration across 12 international markets.
Director Leonn Ward shaped the visual identity of the Home of Halloween hero film. Shot on 16mm film stock in black and white, the production makes a deliberate formal choice that separates it from the saturated, sunlit imagery that defines most destination-marketing campaigns. The monochrome palette evokes the ancient and the uncanny simultaneously, reinforcing the film's central argument that Ireland's relationship with Halloween is not a marketing invention but a lived inheritance stretching back more than two millennia.
Production company Tiny Ark handled the physical production, filming across Irish landscapes that carry visual weight specific to the island — coastal heaths, ancient stone structures, mist-covered fields. Those locations are not generic Celtic scenery. They are the actual geography in which Samhain was practised, and the film's restraint in presenting them — no digital augmentation, no cinematic excess — allows that authenticity to land without qualification.
The creative team at Publicis London was led by Chief Creative Officer Noel Bunting, with creative direction shared across Rhys Hughes, Barret Helander, and Steve Paskin. Designer Oskah Manchip contributed to the visual language of the wider campaign, which extended beyond the hero film to include cutdowns and photography distributed across television, cinema, and digital channels. The campaign's account leadership was managed by Group Business Director Josh Norris and Senior Account Director Luke Perry, with strategy shaped by Adam McGlashan at director level.
The 60-second hero film was supported by shorter-format edits calibrated for digital environments, allowing the campaign's atmospheric tone to carry across viewing contexts without dilution. The choice of 16mm film as a production medium, as noted by Roastbrief US in coverage published on 13 September 2024, reinforced the campaign's commitment to craft as an argument — the grain and contrast of the image itself communicating age, mystery, and the particular texture of Irish autumn light in a way that digital production could not replicate.
The Home of Halloween campaign generated measurable reach at a scale uncommon for seasonal destination-marketing work. The English-language launch film accumulated 14 million views on YouTube during its first month after launch, according to Tourism Ireland. Across all languages and channels — including television, cinema, and online — the campaign recorded more than 100 million views within the same first-month window, also according to Tourism Ireland.
By later reporting, total video views across all languages, television, cinema, and digital channels reached 255 million, according to Tourism Ireland. That figure reflects distribution across 12 international markets and the cumulative effect of a media strategy that combined broadcast reach with targeted digital placement.
Beyond raw viewership, the campaign produced measurable shifts in audience perception. Recognition that Halloween began in Ireland was twice as high among people who had seen the campaign compared to a non-exposed comparison audience, according to Tourism Ireland. Seven in ten people who saw the campaign reported being more likely to want to visit Ireland as a result, also according to Tourism Ireland. The campaign generated 200,000 Ireland-related searches — a figure that connects brand exposure directly to travel consideration behaviour, per Tourism Ireland.
No independent third-party audit of these figures is publicly available at the time of writing. The metrics are drawn from Tourism Ireland's own reporting and are presented here as declared performance data. What the numbers collectively indicate is a campaign that succeeded on both brand and behavioural measures: it shifted a cultural belief — about where Halloween comes from — while simultaneously stimulating demonstrable interest in Ireland as a travel destination. For a 60-second film released in September, that combination of attitudinal and behavioural impact represents a structurally effective outcome.
Tourism Ireland's Home of Halloween is a 2024 travel campaign created by Publicis London. It positions Ireland as the ancient birthplace of Halloween by connecting the holiday to the Celtic festival of Samhain, celebrated more than 2,000 years ago. The campaign launched on 12 September 2024 and ran across 12 international markets via film, television, cinema, and digital channels.
Publicis London created the Home of Halloween campaign. The agency's creative team was led by Chief Creative Officer Noel Bunting, with creative direction from Rhys Hughes, Barret Helander, and Steve Paskin. The 60-second hero film was directed by Leonn Ward and produced by Tiny Ark, shot on 16mm black-and-white film stock across Irish landscapes.
Samhain is an ancient Celtic festival originating in Ireland more than 2,000 years ago. It marked the end of the harvest season and the start of winter, during which the Celts believed the boundary between the living and the dead thinned. Tourism Ireland uses Samhain as the historical foundation for its claim that Halloween originated on the island of Ireland.
The English-language film reached 14 million YouTube views in its first month, according to Tourism Ireland. Across all languages and channels — television, cinema, and digital — the campaign exceeded 100 million views in month one and reached a total of 255 million video views in later reporting, also according to Tourism Ireland.
The campaign highlights three festivals. The Púca Festival runs from 30 October to 2 November in County Meath. Derry Halloween, recognised as Europe's largest Halloween festival, takes place from 28 to 31 October in Northern Ireland. The Bram Stoker Festival, celebrating the author of Dracula, runs from 31 October to 3 November in Dublin.
Recognition that Halloween originated in Ireland was twice as high among campaign viewers compared to a non-exposed audience, according to Tourism Ireland. Seven in ten people who saw the campaign said they were more likely to want to visit Ireland, and the campaign generated 200,000 Ireland-related searches, connecting brand exposure directly to travel consideration behaviour, per Tourism Ireland.
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