Abstract:

The approach adopted to assessing the effectiveness of national destination advertising, where the final sale is not made in an easily measured fashion, should ideally be multi- facetted. In the case of major changes in advertising campaigns made by the Irish Tourist Board, in its principal overseas markets, the assessment of the campaigns was not just confined to consumer attitude research, but also was accompanied by tracking of enquiry levels by source type, and by the outcome in visitor numbers and the performance of key segments from the marketing regions concerned. A number of interesting lessons were learned with regard to the design and implementation of ongoing tracking approaches.