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News & Current Affairs

A campaign for truth in news broadcasting

Role Concept development
Employer Zero‐G, Dublin
Client Media organisation
Year 2019

Following on from some audience research, our client wanted a hook for a campaign to promote their news and current affairs programmes. They wanted to build upon the existing goodwill and trust their audience shared with them.

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The Challenge

Our team were tasked with telling a compelling story about our client’s news & current affairs programming, to reposition them in the minds of the public, so that they would actively choose this source to keep them up-to-date.


The brief was to develop a creative idea based around the new campaign proposition that had emerged from the research. Focusing on trust and truth, the proposition was summarised as “the truth is not always popular but we will always tell it.”  

The Process

I surveyed journalism and news trends and discovered that as news engagement was on the increase, a preoccupation with truth and trust was extremely current. 

The line ‘Truth Matters’ resonated strongly with the client team. My focus with this route was the critical nature of the times that we live in and those times when it matters that we as audiences get as close as we can to the truth. I devised hard-hitting copy, and paired it with images and footage from familiar news stories to build a narrative about truth.
The concept was developed further by imagining how it could work as digital advertising, in social media communications and print advertising. Suggested proof points that the station could employ to garner trust from their audience included  establishing an online fact checking resource like BBC’s Reality Check. 

Public broadcasters have a responsibility to provide a reliable news service, catering for a wide variety of population groups.

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The outcome

The Truth Matters campaign was released as an internet and radio advertising campaign, with opportunity to grow across other platforms in subsequent rounds of advertising.

The concept was intended to communicate the public service role of the broadcaster as an administrator of truth, but it also served to hold this national institution accountable in its official role. At the time of its release in 2019, the campaign caused some controversy on social media when Twitter users took our client to task for allegedly falling short of their commitment to reporting the truth in full. In my opinion, this presents an opportunity to renew their commitment to this public role and strengthen their leadership position in national broadcast journalism, with that core tenet at the heart of all their efforts: ‘Truth matters.’
Note: All featured news footage and stills are attributable to online sources, and were edited by me to conceptualise this campaign. They were never intended for broadcasting purposes.