Judged by Rob Duffield.

First Place: 'The Courier 'Fashion in the Hills' Feature.

A innovative and beautiful feature from The Courier at Mt Barker, which directly and creatively targeted local fashion/clothing businesses to partner, support and work actively with them to showcase fashion innovators-businesses throughout the Hills. The feature included a bright white quality 24-page lift-out in the paper, which included fashion-related editorial alongside ads and beautifully crafted choreographed photos.
The feature offered advertisers unique ways to promote their products including standard ads, styled photos of models wearing their fashion products and ’splash’ pages, featuring cut-out images of several products that could create an outfit.
The feature aimed to showcase products in an innovative high quality prestige way with the paper packaging ads in a variety of ways that readers would find informative and interesting. To enhance and compliment the feature a fashion show was staged that showcased all advertisers' products and raised money for breast cancer research. Advertisers were also offered packages that included ads in the supplement publication and another local magazine.

The feature was unique as it was published with practical assistance from two contractors (the owners of a local fashion business, one of which was also a casual staff member at The Courier). These women were contracted because they recognised the need for input from someone with fashion expertise. The two contractors sold ads to fellow fashion businesses, organised the fashion show, styled the models for the photo shoots and contributed a single ’expert’ piece for the lift-out. 
The stunning feature was laid-out very professionally befitting a city corporate magazine in order to set it apart from the rest of the paper.
The feature attracted several advertisers who do not regularly advertise which is something all publishers should note.

An awesome feature hearty congratulations to the Courier team and fashion retailers of the Hills!

Second Place: The Leader 'Grand  Opening of North St Studios'

This was a small bespoke feature produced by The Leader, just one of many innovative features entered into this category by The Leader Group. The feature was produced for local artists Carol Dadds and Jason Pevreall who were opening a new studio in the Barossa Valley. The paper staff when meeting with the owners to discuss their advertising strategy for the opening, were confronted with a great deal of resistance and objections. ’Your readership doesn’t align with my ideal customer.’
’I don’t want to do something that everyone else does.’ ’If I do something, it has to represent who we are.’

Graphic designer turned journalist, Matt Webster and The Leader rep worked closely with Carol to craft something truly unique. The result was outstanding - a unique bespoke newsletter, featuring bite-size portions of content, using a custom font, totally different layout and varying tones of colour and special effects. The client adored it and has now been hopefully converted to a regular advertising client. Congratulations Leader Group on your persistence and commitment to producing innovative creative features for your local clients.

3rd Place: Murray Valley Standard 'Celebrating 90 Years Feature'

A beautifully crafted and well researched newspaper /local history feature from the Standard. Layout, design, photography, history reprint selection and font variety and colour choice were considered. The bite size yearly briefs from 1934 to 2024 were awesome giving readers an easier less timely way to consume local history. Many days of research would have been needed -a fabulous effort and a very beautiful feature. Editorials focused on the history of the region as recorded in the Standard. The 1934 first edition reprint page  and Snapshots of our Lives pages were outstanding as was the Advertising recollection page, a unique addition which I​ loved. This is one of the best history features I have seen.

As usual a stellar high quality range of entries were received from SA Country Press members in this important and revenue necessary feature category. Well Done!!!