Captain's Log: Day 3 - PR Puffery

Today we had another long and wacky day.

Once again we woke up before my body wanted to (8am) and went for a walk for roughly a mile to the Buswells Hotel for a PR meeting with Gerry Davis, Chief Executive of the Public Relations Institute of Ireland. He was a very engaging speaker and he really knew his stuff despite never having studied PR in his entire life.

He described how PR is not a big business in Ireland and it is nearly nonexistent outside the main city of Dublin. There is one PR firm in the second largest city of Cork but it is very small. He says that due to the small population of Ireland that there is just not much of a demand for PR people and with the recession people are cutting back on PR and advertising.

Speaking of advertising, we then walked about 4 blocks to this really tiny looking old building where the headquarters for Ogilvy & Mather, the largest advertising agency in Ireland, was located. Once we entered the building, we could tell that the building was quite large and very much catered to the tastes of the creative minds of the ad business.

We met with Jo Wood, who was an account planner for the ad agency. She showed us a reel of all of their advertising campaigns they did last year and their clients include such companies as: Ford, Heinz Ketchup, Lucozade (an Irish Energy Drink that is quite popular), Make-A-Wish and several different PSA announcements among many others. Their work is excellent and rivals anything you would see in the U.S. Jo was a very interesting speaker and she definitely knew her business and her wealth of knowledge was an asset to those people who study Ad and PR.

After that, Frankie, Kristen, Brittany, Abbey, Erin, and I decided to explore the area of Dawson Street and Grafton Street. Frankie, Brittany and I were on a mission to do some work for our group web projects and we decided to hit up a very busy Rugby store that sold jerseys to the local supporters.

Somehow, Erin lost Brittany and then Frankie took off as well so Erin and I had to find our way back to the apartments by ourselves -- which we had no problem doing.

Once we all reconvened back at the apartments, we decided to return to Grafton Street to do some more group project work and Brittany took some really cool Panoramic shots.

I walked probably 5 miles in my terribly uncomfortable dress shoes and my feet feel like they have been rubbed raw -- oh joy.