Ada Derana wins big for being innovative

Ada Derana, the premium news property, walked away with the SLIM Brand Excellence silver award for the Most Innovative Brand of the Year at the awards ceremony held recently. The award was due recognition for Ada Derana’s drive to become a leading news provider by strategically innovating its distribution and delivery.

Ada Derana had its beginnings as the conventional television news bulletin aired on TVDerana. Operating in a cluttered market and a challenging political environment, the Ada Derana news brand was honed to represent brand values of reliability, speed and accessibility. Today, Ada Derana is characterised by its availability across delivery channels such as Television, Radio, Web, SMS alerts, IVR, Video Alerts, and social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In most of these forms, Ada Derana is available on a multilingual platform providing greater accessibility to consumers both in Sri Lanka and across the world. The style of the news property has been customised to suit each of the delivery media, taking note of the nature of consumption.

The showpiece of the Ada Derana news property is the adaderana.com web portal which is ranked the Number One news site used by Sri Lankans. Analysis shows that surfers spend more time on the site than they do on that of the nearest competitor. Available in Sinhala, Tamil and English, the site facilitates two way viewer generation by offering consumers an interactive platform to comment on the latest stories and interact with the Ada Derana community, and by allowing viewers to file in their own news reports through Newsdesk - My Report. Meanwhile the Ada Derana SMS Alerts service enjoys the distinction of having the largest subscriber base and the widest coverage, as it is delivered through all major mobile operators in the country.

Laksiri Wickramage, Chairman of TV Derana commenting on the achievement said “In a market flooded with news sources, Ada Derana is indeed proud to be recognised for its innovation. The consumer of news has an array of choices and our constant aim is to be competitive by being accessible in as many forms as possible with the fastest, most accurate and reliable news. We believe we have built a loyal following by being true to our purpose and all credit goes to the men and women on the Ada Derana team who are passionate about being independent, living their brand and being Number One.”