Liberty cans Journalism Awards

Cape Town – Financial services group Liberty decided to cancel its inaugural Journalism Awards. 

In a statement issued on Thursday, Liberty said the Award was cancelled because the company is “redirecting its focus and resources to accelerate the delivery of its strategy”. 

“The decision was not taken lightly, given the importance of the media in the development of our industry and the nation as a whole.” 

Responding to Fin24’s request for more detail on the decision, Sydney Mbhele, chief marketing officer at Liberty explained that Liberty initially launched the Journalism Awards to “celebrate and recognise media excellence in South Africa”. 

“We are now consolidating our fragmented spend to get the biggest impact.,” he added, “and we have realised that sponsoring many different properties that look similar will not help us achieve our objectives. 

“Rather, what will help is ensuring we deepen our focus on a fewer things to make them bigger so as to maximise impact. We have therefore decided to increase our focus on the Liberty Radio Awards as they fulfil the same objective, and more, than the journalism awards." 

Mbehele said the decision to cancel the Journalism Awards was by no means because of Liberty’s decrease in headline earnings in the year to the end of December. 

“The decision was made independent of the annual results hence we are not pulling out of our other sponsorships, nor are we reducing the marketing spend in other areas.” 

Liberty recently said in a trading update that normalised headline earnings per share (HEPS) were likely to drop between 35% and 55% in the year to end-December, compared to the previous period, BusinessLive reported. 

It attributed the decrease to poor portfolio returns, a stronger rand and the write-down of infrastructure investments held in the alternatives portfolio.