Wales Called Us Home Once

In 2000, the Welsh Tourist Board built a campaign on hiraeth [heer-eyeth], the longing for a home or a time you can't quite return to. It worked. Then it stopped.

There is a paper from 2003, published in the Journal of Vacation Marketing, that almost nobody outside a university library has read. It has been cited dozens of times by other academics and, as far as I can tell, roughly never by anyone actually trying to reach Welsh people living abroad.

It's called "Marketing to the Welsh diaspora: The appeal to hiraeth and homecoming." I found it a few months ago, read the abstract, and haven't been able to put it down since. It is, in a quiet way, the closest thing I've found to a founding document for what we're building.

What Wales did

In the last years of the 1990s, the Wales Tourist Board decided to do something that had never been tried for the Welsh diaspora. They would build a marketing campaign aimed not at tourists, but at the scattered. At the Welsh who had left, and their children, and their children's children, spread across America and Australia and Patagonia and everywhere else the coal and the chapel and the hunger had sent them.

They called it Homecoming 2000. In Welsh, Hiraeth 2000.

The timing was deliberate on two fronts. The millennium gave them a reason to invite, and the newly established Welsh Assembly, barely a year old, gave them a reason to want to. A nation that had just taken back a measure of its own governance was reaching out to the parts of itself that lived somewhere else. The campaign's line was Mae'n bryd i ddod adref [mine brid ee dode ad-rev], "It's time to come home."

That is not a tourism slogan. That is a phone call from a relative.

I spent part of that summer volunteering at the International Eisteddfod in Llangollen, choirs from thirty-odd countries descending on a small town in Denbighshire for a week every July. What I remember most clearly is a marquee tent with a bank of those bright translucent iMacs humming away under canvas, a row of tangerine computers a field over from choirs in full traditional dress. As futuristic as they looked, they were no more out of place than the dozens of nationalities surrounding me.

One of the three people who later wrote the paper was Roger Pride, who was the Tourist Board's marketing director at the time. So this isn't an academic looking in from outside and theorising about a campaign. It's the person who ran it, writing down what he learned. That's rarer than it sounds, and it's why the conclusions carry weight.

What they found

Two things, and the first one is the one everybody quotes.

Diaspora audiences are unusually reachable, and unusually cheap to reach, because the emotional work has already been done. You are not persuading someone to feel something about Wales. They already feel it. They have felt it since a grandmother's kitchen, or a name they can't quite pronounce, or a rugby match watched at an ungodly hour in a time zone six hours off. The campaign found it could reach these people through database marketing, public relations and word of mouth rather than expensive paid media, precisely because the audience was already leaning in. They wanted to be found.

I have watched a Welsh flag appear in a crowd in a country where it had no business being, and I have seen what it does to the faces of the people who spot it. The longing is pre-installed. The only question is whether anyone bothers to answer it.

The second finding got far less attention, and it is the one that should keep us up at night.

The paper closes with a caution: momentum has to be maintained. The diaspora should be treated as long-term stakeholders in the home country, as ambassadors and repeat visitors, through ongoing relationship marketing rather than a single campaign. In plainer terms: you cannot call people home once and then go quiet. If you do, you have not built a relationship. You have staged an event, and events end.

Read that back knowing it was published in 2003, three years after Homecoming 2000, by the man who ran it.

What happened next

Not much, as far as I can find. There was no Homecoming 2010. No sustained programme that took the people who came back in 2000 and kept them close, kept them buying, kept them returning, kept them telling their neighbours in Ohio and Ontario what Wales actually is. The moment was real. The follow-through wasn't there.

Scotland tried something similar in 2009 with its own Year of Homecoming, and there's a body of research on how that landed. But the country that shows most clearly what Wales left on the table is Ghana.

In 2019, Ghana ran the Year of Return, marking four hundred years since the first recorded enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia. It was an invitation to the African diaspora, and specifically to Black Americans, to come and stand on the ground their ancestors were taken from. President Akufo-Addo launched it in Washington DC in September 2018. In the first nine months of 2019, visitor numbers rose around forty-five percent year on year, roughly 237,000 additional people.

Here is the part that matters. In December 2019, before the Year of Return had even finished, Ghana launched Beyond the Return: a ten-year plan running to 2030, with an investment vehicle attached so that diaspora money could flow into the country's economy rather than just diaspora footsteps flowing through its airports. They named that account Sankofa, after the Akan idea of reaching back to retrieve what was left behind.

Ghana read the room and understood something Wales seems to have missed. The homecoming is not the product. The homecoming is the introduction.

The shift nobody in Wales noticed

There's a piece of research from 2025 by Torkestani and colleagues, worth reading, that traces how thinking about diaspora marketing has changed over twenty-five years. It cites the Welsh paper directly, which is how I found my way to it.

Their argument, roughly: before about 2010, researchers treated a diaspora as a niche market. A convenient pocket of people who could be sold homeland products because of nostalgia. The vocabulary was consumer, push, penetration, event. After 2010, the thinking shifted. A diaspora stopped being an audience and started being a partner, the people who carry a culture outward into places the home country could never reach on its own. The new vocabulary: partner, pull, development, ongoing.

Hiraeth 2000 sits right at the older end of that. It was a brilliant execution of the earlier idea, and the earlier idea had a ceiling built into it. You invite people home, they come home, they spend money, they leave, and the relationship resets to zero.

Why we exist in the space this left

I live in Las Vegas. My co-founder Jason Edwards lives in Pittsburgh. We both grew up in Wales, which means neither of us is explaining the place from the outside, and neither of us gets to claim he's closer to it than the other. What we have between us is two very different lives lived out from the same inheritance, and a shared conviction that distance doesn't dilute anything. It sharpens it. You notice what you're carrying when you're the only one in the room carrying it.

I know the specific loneliness of being asked whether Wales is in England. I also know the opposite feeling, the one that arrives when you hear the language somewhere it has no reason to be, or meet someone whose grandmother came from the next valley over from yours. Every Welsh person abroad knows both of those, usually in the same week.

The Wales Tourist Board proved, with real money and real numbers, that this feeling is not sentimental noise. It's the most reachable emotion in marketing, because the audience is already holding it and waiting for someone to acknowledge it.

Then they let it go quiet. Not out of malice. Campaigns end, budgets move, governments change priorities. But the effect on the person who came home in 2000 and heard nothing afterward is the same as if nobody had ever meant it.

That silence is the thing we're built against. Not the loss of Wales, which isn't going anywhere, but the fade. The slow drift where a culture stops being talked about and becomes something a family used to be, then something a family thinks it might have been.

We call that the second death, and it doesn't arrive with an ending. It arrives with an absence of follow-up.

So: no campaigns here. No years of anything. Parhad [par-hahd] is the Welsh word for continuance. It's a duller word than hiraeth, and a plainer one, but it's the one that does the work. A garment made well enough to hand down. A story told again next year. A door that stays open after the invitation has gone out.

Wales called us home once, and it was right to. What it needed to do next was stay on the line.

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Sources: Morgan, N., Pritchard, A. and Pride, R. (2003), "Marketing to the Welsh diaspora: The appeal to hiraeth and homecoming", Journal of Vacation Marketing 9(1), 69–80. Torkestani et al. (2025), "Identity Dilemma in Immigrant Consumers: a discourse analysis of diaspora marketing." Ghana Tourism Authority figures for the Year of Return, 2019.