The posters that appeared in London the day before Kneecap member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, aka Mo Chara’s appearance in court on terrorism-related charges, were very much on-brand.
Using the green, white and orange of the Tricolour, giant letters spell out “More Blacks, More Dogs, More Irish, Mo Chara”.
Strategically located near Westminster magistrates court, the three posters include a supersized 96-sheet and two 48-sheet billboards and are set to remain for two weeks.
Also last Tuesday night, the same visual was projected on to three London buildings: Camden’s Electric Ballroom, the location of the Kneecap performance last November that triggered the police investigation, as well as County Hall at Southbank and The Strand in central London.
The visual, says Ken Robertson, “reclaims the language of historic exclusion as a message of solidarity, resistance, and cultural pride”. Irish immigrants to London in the 1950s and 1960s reported seeing “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish” signs in boarding-house windows and it’s a phrase that lives in the memory, thick with racism and bigotry.
Robertson’s agency, The Tenth Man, created the campaign and its instinctive alignment with the group’s public image comes from a history of collaboration that goes back to 2018, long before the rap trio’s fame exploded beyond Belfast.
That was the year the agency was established in Dublin by Robertson and fellow advertising creative Richard Seabrooke. From the start it set up an annual list to pick out 20 “culture makers” doing interesting, meaningful and impactful work. That’s how Kneecap came on its radar.
In the past seven years the agency has collaborated with the Irish language rappers on music videos and political campaigns. Probably its most provocative – and headline grabbing – idea for Kneecap before this billboard campaign was for the Sundance Film Festival last year.
The trio – Mo Chara, DJ Próvaí, real name JJ Ó Dochartaigh and Móglaí Bap, real name Naoise Ó Cairealláin – arrived at the festival where its Irish language film Kneecap was premiering in a replica RUC Land Rover. According to Robertson it is a movie prop, sourced for the stunt from an American film studio.
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It’s not hard to imagine that whatever modest outlay it took to get it to the festival was recouped multiple times over in the media exposure it helped the rappers from Northern Ireland win in the US and back home.
The Tenth Man funded the London billboards because “it views this campaign not just as solidarity, but as a defence of cultural freedom in a time of rising political censorship”. It floated several ideas past Dan Lambert, Kneecap’s manager and this was chosen as the most impactful.
Before setting up the agency, Robertson spent 18 years at Paddy Power, the gambling giant now part of Flutter Entertainment. He was its first marketing executive in 1999 – given the title of head of mischief – and he went on to create numerous provocative and controversial campaigns often in immediate reaction to events in the news or popular culture.
It’s a dubious distinction – which he would be the first to admit – but he created the UK’s most complained about advertisement with the 2015 campaign that featured Paralympian Oscar Pistorius then on trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. It offered punters their money back if he was cleared (he wasn’t).
Looking back at his work at Paddy Power, Robertson acknowledges that some of the campaigns “haven’t aged well” though he says the brand was the “ultimate category challenger” with a target of mostly young men. The brief was to connect with them, often saying the things they thought but wouldn’t say out loud.
“Am I 100 per cent proud of all the work [I did there]? No. What I did learn though is that there is a dotted line from that to Kneecap; to having the bravery to create a campaign that’s provocative, that is going to land in the right place. It is always going to rub some people up the wrong way.”
A knock-on benefit for The Tenth Man of creating such attention-grabbing messaging must also be the exposure it brings to the agency, which last year expanded into the UK with a London office. Its own logo is underneath the band’s balaclava-inspired logo on the posters. The office in Spittalfields now employs six people while the Dublin office has grown to 60.
The agency, he says, appeals to clients who value cultural relevance and want to communicate with a younger demographic. The brands it has done work for include Guinness, Rockshore, Jameson and Stella McCartney. “We are known for our disruptive creative work across music, fashion and youth culture; we’ve built a reputation for backing artists who push against the grain.”
A recent new business win is Three Ireland as the telecom’s “lead partner for creative channel marketing” (Boys and Girls is the company’s brand agency).
Concert goers who saw Kneecap last Thursday in Dublin’s Fairview Park will also have seen the More Blacks, More Dogs, More Irish, Mo Chara visual. It was on pop-up billboards at the stage. So could it become part of the band’s merchandise, for example on T-shirts? Why not, says Robertson, “if someone wants to do it, please do. The message is there to be taken and amplified”.
By the weekend Kneecap were still in the news with questions being asked in the UK as to whether the BBC would or should televise the rappers’ upcoming Glastonbury set. The broadcaster then issued a statement saying filming will go ahead although its editorial guidelines, which among other things prohibit “unjustifiably offensive language”, must be adhered to.
As to whether a publicity stunt similar to the London billboards is in the works for Glastonbury – it is after all a large audience – Robertson says nothing is planned, although an “as yet” seems to hang in the air.
