Aer Lingus is the flag carrier airline of Ireland and the second-largest airline in the country. Founded by the Irish government, it was privatised between 2006 and 2015 and it is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of International Airlines Group, the parent company of British Airways and Iberia.
 
Problem:

Aer Lingus’ existing online media centre was all but defunct. Designed to communicate investor relations activity, prior to the organisation’s acquisition by IAG, the online site was not being used by the internal communications team or journalists and the media.
 
The communications team wanted to start again with an online media centre that was suitable to share with consumer media.  The wanted to create a destination site, so that they could target journalists and the media and host multi-media content, news stories and social media feeds.
 
Ultimately, they also wanted a tool that would streamline enquiries and reduce the team’s workload.  The team were inundated with non-PR related queries, including sponsorship and marketing requests and customer queries.
 
Solution: 

PressArea created a fully customised, media-ready online newsroom; allowing the Aer Lingus communications team to manage and amplify their story.  
 
All development and ongoing management of the media centre was managed offsite by PressArea’s team of expert web designers and developers; requiring minimal IT involvement.  The dedicated newsroom was created from scratch and deployed over a 12-week period, with a later release incorporating Aer Lingus’ new branding.
 
From a design perspective, Aer Lingus’ online newsroom was created as a completely seamless add-on to Aer Lingus’ existing web assets, including Aer Lingus’ main homepage. The adopted URL structure ensured that any content, images and tags have an ongoing benefit Aer Lingus’ overall SEO activity.

 
The full PressArea solution includes:

• Fully customised, online newsroom with the ability to manage press releases, host news stories and view social media feeds.
• A complete, searchable image and video asset library, enabling the communications team to internally manage, tag, search and share images from a single repository.  Journalists and the media are easily able to find, download and resize the desired image, directly from the newsroom. 
• Full content management and content distribution system, allowing the communications team to create a single version of a story that can be published and distributed across multiple channels, including social media.
• A journalist enquiry system allowing incoming enquiries to be directed to the correct internal team.
• Dark site capability enabling the communications team to deploy a dedicated emergency in the event of a crisis.
   

Outcome:

The launch of the PressArea online media centre enabled Aer Lingus to create a single destination for journalists and the media to get the latest news and content related to a specific story.  

Incoming enquiries to the communications have also been streamlined, enabling the team to direct questions to the correct Aer Lingus department.

Ruth Ranson, Communications Director, Aer Lingus commented:

“Thank you [PressArea] for making the launch of our refreshed brand such a success.
Delivering a launch of such significance and scale in such a tight timeframe, was a herculean task, and you all rose to the challenge.
The results are testament to your professionalism, flexibility and results-focussed approach.”