[JUDGING] Core
Section: Social Media Advertising Team of the Year - Agency
Organisation Name: Core
Team Questions
Organisation Name
Core
Structure Of The Team And Their Roles
We believe the best social work happens when media and content work as one.
Core Social is built around this idea of bothism. Paid social and social content need to work symbiotically. Two disciplines that are too often separated but need each other to deliver real effectiveness.
Our team brings together 24 paid social specialists, 6 social content specialists and 3 community managers under one connected social offering within Ireland’s largest agency.
Our paid specialists lead strategy, planning, buying, audience development, optimisation and measurement across the major social platforms. Our content specialists bring platform-first thinking, cultural insight, creators and social storytelling. We also have community management
But the real strength is what happens when those worlds come together. Media insight shapes the content we create. Content performance makes our media buying more effective. Every campaign has a clear role. Every piece of content has a purpose.
And everything starts and ends with the same question: how will this contribute to our client’s business KPIs?
That is how Core Social is structured.
One team. Multiple social specialisms. One shared purpose.
Give Examples Of Your Content Creation Process
DPC’s ‘Pause Before You Post’ shows what happens when social media buying and social content are built together.
The challenge was to get parents to think differently about “sharenting” and the potential consequences of posting their children online. We knew media alone couldn’t change behaviour. Equally, great content without the right media strategy wouldn’t create the scale needed to start a national conversation.
So we built both together.
The content was designed specifically for social. It gave people a reason to stop, watch, think and ultimately share. The media strategy was then designed around those behaviours. We didn’t simply buy reach and hope people paid attention. We used the content to earn attention and the media to amplify that attention into conversation.
As engagement grew, the campaign moved beyond paid media. People shared it. Media outlets discussed it. Organisations internationally picked it up.
The result was 90.8m reach, 15,542 social mentions and coverage across 64 countries.
It proved our core belief that media creates the opportunity to be seen, and content creates the reason to care.
When both work together, social can create genuine cultural impact.
How Are Your Measuring Success Reach Links Traffic Etc
Our A.R.C. Framework – Attention, Relationship and Conversion is built around how people behave on social. It ensures our media buying and content work symbiotically towards the same outcome.
Attention: Buying for reach & frequency with generic video ads can deliver less than two seconds of attention. So we buy for 15-second video views and create social-first video with strong hooks and holds designed to earn that attention. Success is measured by completed video views.
Relationship: If we want people to feel something about a brand we buy for engagement. We pair this with creator and influencer content designed to build interaction and positive sentiment. Success is measured by engagement and positive sentiment measured through social listening.
Conversion: Here we want action. We either buy towards conversions or use mass reach and frequency as a digital OOH reminder. Think constant reminders before the weekly shop. That’s why we use simple static creative that can be recognised and consumed instantly.
Success is measured by actions taken or reach and frequency.
A.R.C is interchangeable based on the business goal. Need to sell more hotel rooms? Conversion. Launching a new product and need attention? Attention. The objective changes. The principle doesn’t: media and content must work together to deliver effectiveness.
Give Three Examples Of Recent Updates Or Initiatives That Have Worked Well Link To Them And Give Some Metrics On Them
IDA Ireland – Invest in Extraordinary
A LinkedIn-led social strategy that put Ireland into the consideration set of the world’s most influential business decision-makers. The campaign generated 240m+ impressions, 855,000+ engagements and contributed to a 105% increase in FDI leads, demonstrating the ability of social to drive real economic impact.
Dalata Hotel Group – Precision Social
We transformed Dalata's social approach by combining audience, media and creative automation. We consolidated 52 always-on campaigns into four scalable campaigns and expanded Precision Social from 174 to 362 contextual ads, helping deliver 23% more bookings YoY.
DPC – Pause Before You Post
A social-first public awareness campaign that turned “sharenting” into a national and international conversation. The campaign generated 90.8m reach, 15,542 mentions and coverage across 64 countries, demonstrating the ability of social to create genuine behavioural and cultural impact.
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DRcD5FijbFU/
Why Are You Deserving Of Team Of The Year
We want to change the norms of social media advertising.
The reality is that every ad is a form of interruption. Our job is to make that interruption valuable. To create content people actually want to consume while delivering the messages our clients need them to consume.
As Ireland’s largest agency and a market leader in social media clients and investment, we have scale. But scale means nothing if we simply follow the rules set by the tech platforms.
Platforms have conditioned advertisers to think in funnels. Awareness. Consideration. Conversion. But people don’t use social media in a funnel. They scroll. Watch. Engage. Discover. Ignore. Share. Buy. Often within the same session.
We believe our responsibility is to challenge those norms. That means buying media around real user behaviour and creating content specifically for the outcome we want to achieve.
It’s why we bring paid social and content together. Why we built ARC around Attention, Relationship and Conversion. And why every impression we buy and every piece of content we create must have a purpose.
We don’t want to follow where social advertising is going. We want to help shape it.