omy.sg and ST Online win XMA Cross Media Awards

Reporting live from Messe Frankfurt; omy.sg picked up another international award win yesterday for our omy Blog Club initiative! More details:

Singapore, 31 October 2012 – Singapore Press Holdings Limited (SPH) has won two awards at the WAN-IFRA XMA Cross Media Awards 2012.

omy.sg and The Straits Times (ST) Online won gold and bronze respectively in the Monetization category at the XMA Cross Media Awards. The awards were presented at the World Publishing Expo 2012 in Frankfurt, Germany yesterday.

Bilingual news and entertainment portal omy.sg clinched the gold award for its omy Blog Club – a community with over 3,000 registered bloggers in Singapore. Set up in 2010, the omy Blog Club provides a platform for bloggers to engage in content-generating activities such as product reviews, exclusive movie screenings, food tasting, blogging contests/challenges etc, while tapping on their social reach and influence to provide unique alternative solutions to advertisers’ needs.

The award is the second international award picked up by omy.sg for its omy Blog Club project this year. The omy Blog Club won another award earlier in May from the International Newsmedia Association (INMA) in the Marketing Solutions for Advertising Clients (circulation over 300,000) category at the 82th INMA World Congress in Los Angeles, California.

Mr Chua Chim Kang, Senior Vice President, Business Development, Chinese Newspapers Division, who is also Editor of Lianhe Wanbao and omy.sg, said: “We are certainly delighted to receive international recognitions from two prestigious awards this year – one in the United States and one in Europe. It shows that we are definitely moving in the right direction with our social media strategy for SPH’s Chinese Newspaper Division and we will continue to focus on this area.”

ST Online won bronze in the same category for “Flying High”, its campaign for Singapore Airlines. The eight-week campaign, which culminated in a contest for two winners, utilised social media to promote the contest.

A travel-oriented microsite called Big Story was created for the campaign. The presentation of its content and stories tapped on photos, videos and social media to create a multi-sensory experience for readers. At the end of the campaign, 450,000 entries were received for the contest, and the microsite exceeded its targeted unique visitorship by more than double.

Commenting on the win, Mr Eugene Leow, Editor of StraitsTimes.com, said: “Making money in the digital frontier is a huge challenge for most media companies. As the online medium invariably becomes more prevalent, together with our marketing colleagues, we are constantly trying out new ideas to offer value for both our readers and advertisers. The award by an external, independent panel of judges is an affirmation that we are doing the right thing.”

The XMA Cross Media Awards is a prestigious competition in the newspaper industry for publishers to benchmark their cross-media offering. It is organised by WAN-IFRA, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. This year’s awards focus on publishers that use social media tools in innovative ways, and engage readers through word-of-mouth campaigns and appealing content on social platforms. Over 90 entries were evaluated by an independent jury of international newspaper and media experts.