Newspapers had plenty to celebrate after the Media Awards 2017. The Awards, which took place on April 20th celebrated all things advertising and media sales in Ireland.
The Irish Farmers Journal went home with the coveted Gold award for Media Brand of the Year, seeing off stiff competition from DMG Media’s Evoke.ie, which took Silver and Independent News and Media, which went home with third. The judges said that this category was extremely close at the top and that Irish Farmers Journal just edged out their fellow news brands by proving how embedded they are in their community and with their target audience. News brands excelled in this category amongst a shortlist that included Exterion Media, Kinetic and Media Central.
Commenting on the win, Irish Farmers Journal chief executive and editor Justin McCarthy said: “We are thrilled to have won this prestigious award. It reflects our continuous focus on developing the best range of print and digital products and media services we can for our readers and commercial clients. Our team is passionate about agriculture and rural Ireland and I am delighted that their hard work, commitment and innovation has been recognised by the wider media industry.”
Independent News & Media was shortlisted for 12 of the 22 categories and went home with a total of six awards. INM’s Gerry Lennon, Managing Director of the Sunday World and the Irish Daily Star was honoured with the prestigious Media Hero award. INM also took home Gold spots for: Best Collaboration Between Agency and Media Owner – Multimedia, for The BFC – The Big Friendly Collaboration; for Best Research Initiative with ‘The Book of Evidence,’ an econometrics study published by INM in May; and for Best Creative Direction/Execution by a Media Owner for Yoplait’s ‘I Love My Age’ campaign. In addition, the publisher won silver awards in the Best Sales Initiative category for ‘The Book of Evidence’; and in the Best Collaboration Between Agency and Media Owner category.
Meanwhile, The Irish Times Content Studio won the Gold award in the Best Sales Initiative. The Content Studio launched in 2016 with the goal of creating meaningful brand partnerships between editorial teams and brands. From launch it drove revenues across digital and also print. In its first year all of the content combined received in excess of 1.54M page views, generating a total of 7.6 years of consumption time for the 60+ brands that it worked with.
NewsBrands Ireland would like to congratulate all of our members who won at the Media Awards 2017.