The 2018 Global Media Awards competition got 830 entries from 220 media companies in 39 countries. Participants included newspaper media, magazine media, digital media, television media, and radio media.
Amar Ujala Kavya, won the honour in 2 categories: "Best Launch of a Brand or Product to Create an Audience Segment” & "Best Idea to Grow Digital Readership or Engagement”, winning 3rd place in both.
Commenting on the achievement, Probal Ghosal, Director - Amar Ujala, said, “What is significant here is that despite being a traditional 70-year-old media group, known best for our news, we had the foresight to create a multi-platform brand called Amar Ujala Kavya, and the insight to see India’s best kept secret - this massive Hindi poetry subculture that eludes mainstream Hindi media. It shows that there is a rich space beyond Bollywood and Cricket. But you can’t connect the dots without a multi-platform approach.”
Amar Ujala Kavya has published, in just six months, 20,000 + Hindi poems and 17,000 + registered poets with profiles online. With presence and response from Newspaper, Web, Social spaces and ground events, it has created a burgeoning community of Hindi poets and poetry lovers - creating poetry in text and video.
“Unlike English readers in India, Hindi readers have a thriving tradition of performance poetry, which straddles popular and high culture, and cuts across age, geography, and socio-economic class. They've no permanent space in mainstream Hindi news media, where popular culture usually means cinema. We reach out to this audience in Kavya,” said Arvind Joshi, AVP - Group Strategy Amar Ujala.
Amar Ujala Kavya’s various tools of user outreach are Virtual and Ground Events, Multiple Submission Modes & Formats, Aspirational Platform, Dedicated Fortnightly Section on Print, Social Platform, and Mass-with-Class Curation. The brand has achieved phenomenal reach in the first 6 months of its launch for its niche - touching 46 Million Amar Ujala readers every fortnight (Print), and 350 K people every month online. About 1 million people are reached every month via Facebook and over 100 k+ through 17 poetry event-series conducted online and on-ground.
