Our awards shelf welcomes a new trophy; the Bronze award for the Best Online Newsroom for our work on the new updated Marriott media site. 

This is our fourth award at the Digital Impact Awards, in 2023 we won a gold award for the Best Online Newsroom for our work with the new combined John Lewis Partnership/JohnLewis/Waitrose media site, in 2021 we won gold with our DFS press site, and in 2020 we won gold with our Luton Airport site.

We have provided an online newsroom for the Marriott International EMEA hotel group UK press team since 2019, and the site has been very successful. In November 2022, we were asked to create a new website that would be used by their PR teams and media across Europe and The Middle East, and available in English, German, Italian, French, Spanish and Arabic.  

The new, all-inclusive site would need to be easily navigable by media across the different territories and would show different homepages, press releases, image libraries, and social feeds for each language, including an Arabic version, where the site would work text that goes from right to left instead of left to right.

Creating six sites under one domain and making them all easily accessible was going to be a tall order. We had produced a site for the John Lewis/Waitrose/John Lewis Partnership with three different personalities previously. But this had the added complications of, producing an Arabic version, retooling the back-end administration part of PressArea so that it was multi-lingual, importing hundreds of releases – mostly in PDF and Word format - and thousands of images from six different teams, plus training and supporting 30+ users on the system.

In November and December 2022, we produced several different designs for the Marriott teams to consider and work on the build started in February 2023.

The new solution provides a consistent look across the different territories and media can easily see the latest news, imagery and videos for each language, with each site accessible from the same URL.  Additionally, for the Marriott teams, there is a single multi-lingual interface where the teams can upload images and post releases to their territory and to other territories.   

The site launched at the end of June 2023 and has been a success for the Marriott teams and is appreciated by the media using it.

This is the 15th year of the Digital Impact Awards, and it has become an industry-wide benchmark in digital stakeholder engagement across the UK,  Europe and now globally. This year was the second year that the award has been open to global players, with this year’s event setting a benchmark for the industry, showcasing a diverse range of creative and effective approaches to digital communications in an ever-evolving landscape.

Commenting on the awards, Andrew Thomas, founder of the Digital Impact Awards said. “Our 2024 winners exemplify the increasingly dynamic ways that digital corporate communications continues to expand, from internal communications tools that connect and motivate teams, to campaigns that strengthen brand reputation and foster trust with key stakeholders. This year’s awards reflect not only excellence in execution but also the innovation and strategic thinking needed to navigate a digital world that is increasingly complex.”

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.