As the annual Cannes Lions festival of creativity beckons, it only seemed appropriate to look at the role news brands play in underpinning, supporting, and championing creativity — both editorially and commercially.

Creativity no longer comes in the form of a stand-alone print ad or article. News brands are reimagining storytelling as we know it.

Here are a few great examples:

The Guardian and Audible

Amazon’s audio arm challenged The Guardian to come up with an innovative way to encourage audiences to pick up a book over the summer holidays. To kick off the activation, the team produced an Audible supplement, which included different Shazam codes. When readers scanned the codes using the app, it opened a bespoke Augmented Reality experience allowing readers to hear snippets of popular audiobooks.

The print supplement featured reviews of all the books, and users were offered the opportunity to visit the Audible site to download the full text. Try it out: Shazam the Audible image above and sit back and enjoy!

Mail Metro Media and Pukka Herbs

The advertising arm of the Daily Mail and Metro teamed up with well-being company Pukka Herbs to deliver its first ever podcast for its latest Pukka campaign. The podcast series “The Wellness Connection” is hosted by lifestyle blogger Jasmine Hemsley. It features talks with health and well-being influencers from different disciplines to explore how we can begin our wellness journeys.

The partnership featured a combination of activations including display ads running in Metro newspapers, on the MailOnline, and on Metro.co.uk. Teams also handed out samples of Pukka tea across the United Kingdom.

The Telegraph and The Expenses Files

To mark the 10-year anniversary of The Telegraph’s expenses story, the publication launched various multi-platform activations. Collateral included a documentary called “The Disk: The Real Story of MPs’ Expenses” featuring the team who originally broke the story, a Telegraph podcast series on journalism and politics, and a “How much does your MP claim?” tool allowing people to find out how much MPs receive in expenses.

The publication even launched an interactive game called “MP’s expenses — could you have beaten the system?” to find out whether your claims would have been approved or if you would have been sent to prison.

The Times and JFK Unsilenced

Fifty-five years after President John F. Kennedy was silenced, The Times recreated the speech he was meant to deliver the day he was killed. Aptly named “JFK Unsilenced,” Artificial Intelligence (AI) and innovative sound engineering used previous recordings to match his voice to the speech so that his final words could, at last, be heard.

The Times prides itself in representing different voices, and this project successfully brought its vision to life and connected the publication with more than 1 billion readers across the globe. The AI audio speech was a first in the world and won seven Cannes Lions including a Grand Prix for Creative Data.

For this year’s Cannes Lions festival, Newsworks has teamed up with the UK Government’s Department for International Trade and various industry partners to promote the very best of British creativity under the banner #CreativityIsGREAT.

Follow our Cannes Lions story as we continue to showcase how creativity allows us to tell better stories and how technology allows us to drive greater engagement with both consumers and readers.

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