Q&A with winners of Power of Planning competition

This month we catch up with our NewsBrands Power of Planning winning team from Starcom to hear more about their experience of our annual education event. The winning media plan was created by Kate Deane, Sean Lyons, Varsha Ravindranath, Orna Monaghan, Rebecca Doggett, and Tara Delaney.

What was your biggest takeaway from the Power of Planning education day and competition?

The whole day was an amazing learning experience and having the opportunity to meet so many people in the news publishing industry was great. The panel discussion was really interesting as we got to hear about the sustainability initiatives that news publishers have been taking which I otherwise wouldn’t have known.

It was amazing to meet reps from the different publishing houses and see the kind of impact each brand can have on people.

It was a great day out meeting people in the industry and getting to know more about how newsbrands can really benefit our brands and the different bespoke packages they can create for our clients. Working together on the Mexican food brief was a lot of fun and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who’s thinking of entering.

Your winning media plan for the launch of a new Irish food range included partnerships with major Irish news brands. What were your reasons for using newsbrands to reach the target audience?

Our choice was based on how effectively the news brands would reach our target audience across all their newspapers and news websites using impactful formats. We spoke to representatives from each brand on the day of the competition, and they provided us with stats and reach figures that aided our decision.

We were working with 3 different target audiences, so it was important that we didn’t just use a ‘one size fits all’ method. We considered the key elements of each target and chose the newsbrands based on how effective their reach would be to each audience, also considering any of the newsbrands where we could leverage additional data & intel to gather further insights on our consumers.

What is your favourite way to use newsbrands platforms (podcast/print/display, etc)

I enjoy planning Display the most due to the kind of research that goes behind finding out more about the target audience and their preferences. You can also get really creative with the keywords and buckets of people you target.

I enjoy the use of podcasts. It can be really interesting and fun to naturally incorporate advertisements seamlessly into conversation. It also can be a great way to target a niche audience based off their interests and allows for creativity.

Read more about our Power of Planning competition here