Mr. Mark Henry:

There are two questions there. In respect of the analysis of the effectiveness of what we are doing, we spend in the order of €500,000 on research every year out of our budget of around €35 million for marketing. We spend a fair amount on analysis. Part of it is understanding the customer and the other bit is assessing our competitive positioning and our communications and how they perform.

We are just getting the research for this year in but research we saw from last year emphasises the point that Ireland is very well positioned so a key metric for us is what the interest in holidaying in Ireland is versus other destinations. In all of our top four markets, Ireland would be in the top ten places that people want to holiday in at some point in the future if not in the next 12 months. In some of those countries, such as the US and France, we would be up there in fourth or fifth position of all the places they would like to holiday in. That is a key metric for us regarding generating interest in visiting. We then specifically address the programmes and the return on investment we get for every euro we spend. Our most recent study last year showed us achieving in the order of a €40 to €1 return for every euro we are spending, which compares quite favourably to other tourist boards for which that information is available.

We are strong believers in the shift to digital. As has been flagged in some of the comments, we are leaders in terms of that investment compared to other tourist boards. The reason we made that choice is because consumer research would say that aside the word of family and friends, the Internet is now the number one influencer on destination choice - not even simply the planning or booking but the actual choice of where to go. People turn to the Internet rather than guidebooks in the first instance. How is that mirrored in our activity? Last year, in delivering this new strategy we developed in Great Britain, we moved off most of the TV advertising and switched a huge chunk to YouTube and advertising where we could target the Social Energisers and the Culturally Curious very clearly and directly with relevant messages that were discrete to them. I spoke about our investment in social media building up more than 2.2 million Facebook fans. Again, research there would show that this is a very valuable tool for us because people are asking us to communicate them daily and to give them some information on Ireland. It is a wonderful opportunity for us to get a message to them. Two-thirds of those people we surveyed said that since they had become a follower of Ireland on Facebook, they would be more likely to go there to holiday because they did not know there was so much going on and they found something of interest to them. We have a specific ambition in the corporate plan we have just completed for 2014 to 2016 relating to the digital space. Currently, we send about one million warm leads off our digital platforms to industry websites. Our ambition is to more than double that by 2016. Despite having a challenging resource environment, we have the ambition to drive efficiency and effectiveness and to make that money go further for industry over the next three years.