escape the madness...discover ireland ad goes viral & with good reason! voiced by chris o'dowd @corksredfm

Escape the madness, Tourism Ireland's video advertisement targeting Londoners, has enjoyed viral success since its launch yesterday. The video is part of Tourism Ireland’s campaign to attract harassed London commuters to Ireland during the upcoming Olympic Games. Mark Henry of Tourism Ireland said it was the “most viral campaign in the past two years” and they were targeting 200,000 views of the video over the next three weeks. The video shows two London friends compete in a race to see whether one can get to Ireland as fast as the other can get to his office in London city centre, with voice-over by actor Chris O’Dowd. The video has had 34,000 views since it went live at 11am yesterday.. Mr Henry said it has reached about 370,000 people on twitter through their twitter-feeds and that 436,000 people in Britain saw the Facebook post yesterday. “All in all it’s reaching a lot of people.” The video finishes with an option to choose whether the viewer would "escape" or "embrace" the "madness" of busy London. So far twice as many people have chosen the escape option. However, Mr Henry said it is too early to gauge if the video had led to an increase in bookings. “I haven’t any evidence to say they have escaped yet but we hope they are making their plans today.” In the first 24-hours the video reached number thirteen in the UK Viral Video Charts. The video comes online as the first Olympic Games Lane was opened this week and Chris O’Dowd has tweeted his cameo in the campaign is his entry in the “heavyweight section of the Olympic traffic games.”