TOURISM IRELAND SPENT almost €50,000 on a marketing campaign to tie in with the release of the new instalment of hit video game Assassin’s Creed.

The latest expansion of the Valhalla series ‘Wrath of the Druids’ saw gamers travel virtually to Ireland with the Giant’s Causeway, Benbulben, and the Hill of Tara all featuring.

For the first time ever, Tourism Ireland collaborated directly with gaming streamers using influencers on the popular streaming platform Twitch in France, Germany, Britain, and Scandinavia.

Tourism Ireland said the campaign had cost a total of €49,405 but declined to release details of how much the individual influencers had been paid citing commercial sensitivity.

From that total, €1,599 was paid to Maxmedia for their work on video editing while media agency OMD were hired to arrange the influencer campaign.

In France, Tourism Ireland worked with a streamer called NotaBene who had 5,545 viewers on his two-hour live stream on Twitch.

Recorded extracts from that livestream on YouTube and other Ireland-related material garnered more than 50,000 views since they were uploaded.

In Germany, a streamer called Kaya Yanar did an advance promotion on Instagram that generated more than 60,000 impressions.

His live stream on Twitch had 4,440 viewers and almost 20,000 views on YouTube, according to Tourism Ireland.

In the Nordic countries, a streamer called Keebabb worked on the campaign with over 4,000 people seeing his posts on Instagram and another 6,000 watching his YouTube video.

Tourism Ireland said the British leg of the campaign was now underway while their own video created for social media had hit more than 60,000 views and helped generated international coverage.

They said: “In rolling out our Assassin’s Creed Valhalla campaign, our aim is to bring the island of Ireland to the attention of a new audience of gamers.

“We want to spike their curiosity about the locations which feature in the game and inspire them to come and explore them in real life.”

They said their video collaboration with game creators Ubisoft was designed to keep Ireland ‘top of mind’ for post-Covid holidays by showcasing Viking heritage and spectacular landscapes.

A brief for the campaign, also released under FOI, said Twitch influencers would be briefed on Irish history for when they were live-streaming.

It said: “The tour guide will talk about how the game they are playing is based on real-life Viking history in Ireland e.g. pointing out art and artefacts in the game that have real-life parallels in Ireland, and similar locations in real-life Ireland.”

The campaign brief also said it would be reaching a wide audience of young people with disposable income, who love to both travel and play games.

It said it would be designed not to ask viewers to visit Ireland right now, but that it would be on their wish-list for “when the pandemic has subsided and people can go on holiday again”.