News UK has been named Best Consumer Digital Publishing Company at the AOP Digital Awards.

The Grand Prix award is handed to media companies that have demonstrated outstanding achievement across all brands and publishing activities. 

The judges rewarded News UK for its focused drive towards a digital-first approach across the business, delivering digital growth despite the severe impacts of lockdown. 

The Sun grew total readership, as well as increasing loyalty and engagement, remaining the UK's biggest digital newsbrand. Meanwhile, The Times and The Sunday Times focused on ensuring they were providing a customer-first, market-leading news experience, as well as driving reach and sampling. 

Highlights for Wireless included the redevelopment of the talkSPORT app to enable it to offer a number of live commentaries concurrently, developing and launching Times Radio during lockdown, launching the successful Stories of our Times podcast and driving record on-demand listening.

Meanwhile our commercial teams launched The Fifth, our full service influencer marketing agency, which has since launch partnered with leading brands, including Tag Heuer, Marc Jacobs, Lucozade and TikTok. The team has also launched The Social Studio - which allows clients and agencies access to our newsroom video capabilities.

News UK was nominated for eight awards, for work between 2019 and 2020. It won three, including Best Insight Project of the Year, and was highly commended for one.

Accepting the award for News UK, Dominic Carter, Group Chief Commercial Officer, said: “We are enormously gratified that our work – and what we have achieved in this challenging period particularly – has been recognised with this title. 

“I’m very privileged to work with an amazing team of people from every part of this organisation, and this is the recognition that they deserve.”

Charlie Celino, News UK sales lead, landed the Digital Publishing Rising Star award, after he successfully built a seven-figure incremental revenue stream for News UK over the last eight months, launching The Social Studio, an entirely new product. Judges praised his "significant contribution to commercial success." 

The Times and The Sunday Times won Best Insight Project of the Year for their content review, which was a long-term content science project analysing the impact of editorial decisions on the behaviour of readers.

Meanwhile News UK also scooped a gold for Media Owner Media Idea at the Media Week Awards for a recent Kia campaign, which featured long-form videos that demonstrated that cars can help connect us emotionally, as well as geographically. Judges said the campaign showed “compelling execution that led to measurable business results”.