The Irish Times Content Studio has been awarded a Global Media Award for Best Native for the second year running by INMA (the International News Media Association) at a ceremony in Washington this week.
The award was for its work with Ulster Bank on the Story of Home (irishtimes.com/storyofhome), a six-part print, digital, video series designed to appeal to first-time buyers. They also took third place in the Best Marketing Solution category for the Be One Inspire One series, also with Ulster Bank. Spark Foundary was the media agency on both winning campaigns.
INMA’s Best Execution of Native Advertising category is awarded to a publisher that has demonstrated the highest standard in story telling, business approach and measurable results on a native advertising campaign in the past 12 months. Entries were judged by an international panel of 50 executives from 20 countries and INMA report that they had a record number of entries across its 20 categories in 2018.
“We’re obviously delighted to be recognised on an international stage for producing work that represents the very best in the world in this industry,” said Gary Quinn, editor of The Irish Times Content Studio, who led the editorial side of the campaign. Content Studio also won gold in this category in 2017 with The Ice Swimmer, sponsored by Audi.
“Winning twice in a row is a remarkable achievement but also proves the merit of our business approach,” explained Rachel Leonard, who was the commercial lead on the Ulster Bank campaign in The Irish Times Media Solutions department. “Crucially, the strong measurable results show that our readers are ready to engage with high quality commercial-editorial content and this would have held great weight with the INMA judges.”
