Africa Digital Media Awards announces 2021 winners

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All winners of the Digital Media Africa Awards will automatically qualify for the Wan-Ifra World Digital Media Awards 2021, in which all regional winners from across the globe will participate.

Africa Digital Media Awards 2021 winners

• Best News Website or Mobile Service: Legit.ng, GMEM, Nigeria. Their in-house engineering team developed a mobile app that allows their readers to download news automatically while they are in WiFi zones.

• Best Paid Content Strategy: News24 for subscribers and Maverick Insider.
  After 20+ years of publishing content for free, News24 launched a freemium paywall in August 2020. This converted 4% of its registered users to digital just months later. Maverick Insider is the membership community for Daily Maverick with the cause of keeping Daily Maverick free for all.

• Best in Audience Engagement: Pulse, Nigeria, for “Innovative content delivery for TikTok”. The digestible creation of content and cross-posting to Instagram and Facebook across a wide range of topics and industries won this award for Pulse.

• Best Project for News Literacy: The Wrap, explain.co.za, South Africa. The ethos of The Wrap is to create content that is accessible to all users - whether it be in audio, text, PDF, or Whatsapp message.

• Best Digital Marketing Campaign for a News Brand: Media 24 for Volksblad: Converting print readers to digital” and Standard Group PLC (Kenya) for “Project Eagle”. Volksblad is the effort Media24 went through to get their print readers converted to digital, while Project Eagle surrounded the launch of Standard Group’s paid-for digital content strategy.

• Best Use of Online Video: For the love of the land by Food for Mzansi, South Africa.A 10-part documentary about the journeys of mostly black farmers across South Africa, this series aimed to let storytelling give an accurate representation of what farmers in South Africa go through every day - and the way they give hope to their communities.
  
  
• Best Data Visualisation: “The Architecture of Apartheid”, African Drone, South Africa. This project focused on the unique architecture of hostels constructed during the Apartheid era, initially built to house black labourers near mining towns. Africa Drone put together a visualisation of all the hostels still in South Africa, and begs the question - what do we do about them?

• Best Native Advertising / Branded Content Campaign: “See the bigger picture”. The project aimed to show the correlation between news stories and broader-scale businesses. Each piece took a journalistic approach that created commercial impact for the client in question.

• Best Trust initiative: Maverick Citizen for Covid-19 mis/disinformation. Maverick Citizen gave their readers access to a wide range of information about Covid-19 from professionals, through interviews which spoke about vaccines, misinformation and deepfake news.
  
  For more information on the African Digital Media Awards, go here.