Our awards shelf is starting to look a bit full today. We’re happy to announce that PressArea has won the Gold award for the Best Online Newsroom for our work with the new combined John Lewis Partnership/JohnLewis/Waitrose media site.  

PressArea has provided online newsrooms for the John Lewis and Waitrose brands since 2014, and both sites were very successful.  But in March of last year, we were asked to create a new website that combined the Waitrose and John Lewis websites and would also now incorporate a solution for the parent brand John Lewis Partnership as well. 

The new all-inclusive site would need to be easily navigable by media and contain press releases, image libraries and video, but would also need to maintain the different brand values for each of the three separate brands. 

Creating three sites under one domain was going to be a tall order as to our knowledge this had not been tried before. The tabbed solution we produced provides a consistent look across the different brands for media using the site. The media can quickly see the latest news, imagery, videos and social media feeds for each brand, but, crucially, these look sufficiently different to highlight the different brands. 

The site launched at the end of July 2022 and has been a success for the three John Lewis Partnership brands and the media using it.

This is the third Gold award PressArea has won at the Digital Impact Awards - in 2020, we won Gold with our Luton Airport site, and in 2021 we won with our DFS press site.

PressArea received the award at the London Marriott Hotel Grosvenor Square last night in front of an audience of industry contemporaries and large businesses, including Asus, BT, Deloitte, Dyson, EE, Lloyds, NatWest, PWC and Vodafone.

This is the 14^th year of the Digital Impact Awards, and it has become an industry-wide benchmark in digital stakeholder engagement, with each year’s entries getting better and better and the competition for each category getting stronger and stronger.

Commenting on the awards, Andrew Thomas, founder of the Digital Impact Awards said. “This year’s awards signify the incredible progress that digital communications continues to make across the professional sphere." Adding. "The sheer quality and spirit of the evening’s winners exemplify not only the calibre of digital communications today but also the value that it brings.”

The 28-person judging panel for this year’s competition was drawn from a wide range of disciplines and included Caroline Abomeli, Director of communications at A2Dominion Group, Suhail Adam, Head of social media, UK and Europe at Tata Consultancy Services, Elizabeth Charlesworth, Head of communications at The Old Vic, Andrea Gold, Head of channels and measurement at Rolls-Royce amongst others see the full list here https://www.digitalimpactawards.com/europe/judges/judges/.

The awards are run by Cravenhill Publishing, the publisher of Communicate magazine and are sponsored by the International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO) and the PRCA – the World’s largest PR professional body.  

For more information on PressArea and how we can help your brand, and to organise a free no-strings demonstration of PressArea and to discuss prices and options available click here.