When was the last time you were truly surprised when you consumed a piece of content?
In a cultural landscape that’s become ever more self-curated, the element of the unexpected feels as though it’s diminished. Can we really leave room for surprises when we’re encouraged to prune our feeds to the millionth degree?
It was at the judging day of the 2025 Newsworks Awards, going through the submissions with my fellow judges, that I was struck not just by how much this sensation thrives across news brands’ range of print and digital formats, but also how much it still has the power to engage at scale. We were treated to so many executions that in many cases could only have been fully realised in news brands. The magic ingredient across many of them? Context.
Context informs so much. It provides the reader with expectations of the format (and the advertiser with an opportunity to cleverly subvert them). The editorial of a space not only gives advertisers opportunities to frame their message around the existing content, but also an opportunity to align themselves to themes personally relevant to readers in that moment. This allows them to show up in unexpected ways.
What’s more, this editorial comes not from our own curation of the infinite content found online, but by expert news, sport and cultural journalists that pull together the world’s disparate stories into a thread of everything that’s worth knowing on a given day. All we readers have to do is engage with the news brands that most speak to us.
Here are just some of the awards entries that particularly stood out to me from a context perspective this year.
Creative context provides an effective edge
A brilliant example to start with is Hearts & Science’s best content partnership winning campaign for Allwyn’s EuroMillions brand. With the advertiser looking to capture the nation’s imagination and increase its cultural relevance in the process, EuroMillions bravely moved beyond its decade-long TV campaign and looked to a viral hit from meme culture for creative inspiration: “If I won the jackpot, I wouldn’t tell anyone… but there would be signs.”
However, while the campaign was social media-inspired, socials only formed part of a multiplatform activation across the Guardian’s portfolio of formats – including video, socials, as well as print. Across the business, lifestyle, culture sections, EuroMillions’ content-led partnership blurred the line between finance and fantasy, inviting readers to form their own jackpot dreams. ‘My very own crisp chef’ or a ‘Monet for the loo’, anyone?
The ad didn’t just take advantage of news brands’ agile multiplatform nature and unique and trusted tone of voice. It also used its meme culture inspiration to take the contextual expectations of the news brand format and turn them on their head. Viral-style headlines, meme-inspired creative and interactive digital executions contributed to a campaign that saw sales rise, engagement grow and brand perception skyrocket.
Another campaign that did this well was ‘Taking Care of Things’ by OMD UK and British Gas, shortlisted in the best display category. With consumers increasingly believing that the energy supplier wouldn’t be by their side during tough economic times, it needed to prove it could walk the walk as well as talk the talk.
Step in ‘The Things’ – a family of fluffy blue creatures that could warm up the British Gas brand with some clever contextual planning.
Appearing in popular sections of Metro such as ‘60 Seconds’, ‘Rush Hour Crush’ and its home, property and sport sections, the Things were fully integrated into the surrounding editorial. Each mascot was matched to a different section: the Twin Things kicked a ball across the sports page; Mrs Thing spruced up her home in the ‘Spring Cleaning Special’; Tween Thing texted someone special next to ‘Rush Hour Crush’. Wondering where they would pop up next gave the campaign joy as readers encountered them throughout the paper.
Seemingly spontaneous but in reality, very deliberately crafted, this harnessing of context to bring a brand closer to the nation’s conversation is something that’s a key strength of the medium. What’s more, the campaign is starting to move the dial on its objectives – standing out in a crowded market, growing recall, consideration and positive brand perceptions in the process.
The strategic power of context
The effectiveness angle is not only important to justify context’s contribution to the bottom line when it comes to creativity, but also in more subtle ways.
What particularly stood out at this year’s awards was the understanding of how news brands’ role in the media ecosystem could provide advertisers with impressive returns on investment. Nowhere was this more evident than in the grand prix-winning entry from EssenceMediacom and Tesco.
While the supermarket had always been a heavy-hitting supporter of news brands, its existing strategy of short-burst promotional advertising was failing to cut the mustard. Its comms were no longer visible or long-standing enough to make that all-important cut-through in shoppers’ conversations around value for money. It was then, way back in 2016, that the weekly Tesco Clubcard Trade Partnership with The Sun and Reach titles was born.
More than just ramping up marketing around its weekly deals, the retailer wanted to make sure its offers were embedding themselves deeply within the nation’s news consumption. Where better to do that than on news brands’ most iconic advertising real estate: the front page.
EssenceMediacom and Tesco knew that context was key when it came to effective advertising. Aligning itself with the nation’s biggest daily talking points made the supermarket’s deals more likely to be a talking point too. The partnership had hit upon a key news brand strength that’s becoming ever harder to come by: shared national media experiences.
What’s more, as news brands’ multiplatform offerings have continued to develop and innovate, Tesco has increasingly moved with the times, ensuring their offers were visible wherever audiences were consuming content online, too.
All this culminated in a partnership that has delivered short-term sales, long-term return on investment and strong value perception for over a decade. EssenceMediacom and Tesco were worthy winners of both advertiser of the year and the grand prix award.
Proving the effectiveness of brand safe news brands
This year’s awards were particularly interesting to judge because of one entry that stood out for its bravery and its contribution to the future sustainability of news brands. However, as it wasn’t a campaign, it didn’t fit into any of the pre-existing categories. That was how the judges’ special recognition award was born.
This entry, submitted by Bountiful Cow, was ‘Relative Advantage: Unblocked’, the agency’s initiative to demonstrate the brand safety and effectiveness of digital news brands in an age of keyword adblocking. Bountiful Cow partnered with participating clients to buy up digital ad inventory that brand safety tools traditionally deem ‘unsafe’, putting to the test the claim that hard news environments have a negative impact on campaigns.
The results proved Bountiful Cow right: both brand lift and action intent more than doubled on ‘unsafe’ content classifications versus ‘safe’. Consideration tripled, while brand preference jumped by almost half.
Again, this entry was a success grounded in a deep knowledge of context when it comes to media placements. It was a brilliantly human understanding of the nuances behind language and the news agenda, ensuring that clients weren’t missing out on high-reach, high-attention digital ad spaces that could make a real difference to the bottom line. Bountiful Cow didn’t accept the blunt status quo view about news brand contexts; it thought outside the existing industry box to do the right thing by its clients and support trusted journalism in the process.
The power of context on the page and behind the scenes
Whether it informs the creative itself, a campaign’s strategic placement or the fundamental choice to execute it in news brands, this year’s Newsworks Awards have left us in no doubt that context is crucial to campaign success.
While we as readers get to delight in the magic of context with witty wordplay in clever placements, it’s arguably what goes on under the bonnet that’s even more impressive.
Those who get strategic with placement by building an intimate knowledge of news brands’ formats and readerships – all while making the execution look easy – are the ones who really stand to gain from everything else news brands offer, including reach, scale and trust.
With our media consumption becoming increasingly self-curated, brands have fewer opportunities to generate genuinely inspiring relevance and attention outside of their core audiences. The Newsworks Awards demonstrated those opportunities continue to thrive in multiplatform news brands.
More details of the winning entries and pictures of the Newsworks Awards 2025 event can be found here.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
