A team of junior planners from Spark Foundry were the overall winners of the NewsBrands Ireland Power of Planning competition.
The competition saw teams of young media planners from 13 of Ireland’s leading agencies participate in the day-long event to devise strategies to showcase the range and effectiveness of the various print and online platforms that make up NewsBrands Ireland. The runner up was a team from Mindshare.
Each team was given a creative brief and had the day to prepare their strategies and plans, with representatives from the various NewsBrands Ireland advertising departments on hand to provide information about their products and answer questions. At the end of the day, each team was then given five minutes to present to the judges: Peter McPartlin, Mitchell O’ Gorman, Kantar Media, and Denise Turner, NewsWorks UK.
The teams were judged on the basis of five criteria: Interpretation of the Brief; Strategic Thinking; Creative Use of the Medium; Use of Budget; and Overall Presentation . With a budget of €500,000 the Spark Foundry team, made up of Francois Vieu, Rachel McCloskey, Shauna Barry, and Victoria Price, devised a plan for the fictitious fashion brand, Court Your Hot, which used a clever combination of print and digital news brands, featuring native content, clever press formats, podcasts, and video.
AccordingPeter McPartlin, Chairman of the judging panel: “The standard of performance by the 13 agency teams involved in the Power of Planning event was the highest we’ve seen to date. It is really encouraging to see a new generation of media people embracing the range of different opportunities that news publishers now provide. The Spark team won based on their clear strategic thinking and then linking that to some great ideas to bring the brand platform alive.”
To coincide with the Power of Planning competition, NewsBrands Ireland hosted a breakfast to provide media planners with a complete overview of the growing news brands media landscape.
Speaking at the breakfast conference were Vincent Crowley, Chairman of NewsBrands Ireland, Peter McPartlin, media expert and Chair of the Power of Planning judging panel, Denise Turner, insight director with NewsWorks UK, Áine Smyth, brand manager, Audi Ireland, and Mitchell O’ Gorman, MD of Kantar Media.
In her presentation, Denise Turner dispelled the myths of the news industry and presented other insights including the importance of placing ads in a quality digital environment. She also challenged the notion that being in a hard news environment (crime, politics, terrorism) is damaging to advertiser brands, showing that it has no negative impact on advertising response.
She also underlined the ability of both print and digital news brands to drive widespread business effects as part of a multi-media campaign, referencing research NewsWorks have recently carried out with the renowned effectiveness expert Peter Field using data from the IPA Databank. Mitchell O’ Gorman, meanwhile, used the latest TGI data to demonstrate the reach of news brands and the quality of the audience they deliver, showing that news brands print and digital content now reaches a total of 74% of the Irish population and heavy media consumers are more likely to pay more attention to print adverts over all other types of adverts
In her presentation, Áine Smyth showed how Audi Ireland has been using print and digital news brands to great effect to stand out from the clutter of car advertising, and how it has created bespoke content for news brands. For Audi Ireland, news brands offer the opportunity to deliver on both brand and tactical objectives, she said.
