Ringier wins European Excellence Award 2025 with "SPEAK 2025"

The award ceremony took place on December 5 as part of the 19th European Excellence Award Show at the Bar jeder Vernunft in Berlin.

The corporate storytelling format "SPEAK" has been managed and continuously developed by Johanna Walser, Ringier's Chief Communications Officer, in close collaboration with Marc Walder (CEO), Georg Sturm (Sturmzentrale Advertising), Hannes Sigrist-Thompson (FS Parker) and Thomas Goebbels (Film Advertising Brands, FAB) since 2020.

The European Excellence Awards are among the most prestigious communication awards in Europe. They recognize outstanding strategic, creative and effective communication work across companies, industries and markets. Each year, several hundred projects from across Europe are judged by an independent, international jury. The award-winning work includes corporate and executive communications, brand storytelling, digital innovation, internal communications and sustainability. The awards are regarded throughout Europe as the benchmark for professional communication quality.

Marc Walder, Ringier CEO: "The excellent team under the leadership of Johanna Walser, accompanied by Hannes Sigrist-Thompson and Georg Sturm, has been designing and producing the Ringier Group's SPEAK format for several years. Thanks to this outstanding work, SPEAK has become Ringier's most important information, orientation and inspiration event."

The "Executive Communications & Positioning" category honors communication concepts that sustainably strengthen the role and credibility of company management - both internally and externally. From hundreds of submissions, the jury chose Ringier's "SPEAK 2025" due to its clear narrative line, strategic stringency and concrete impact in the classification of key future issues and the strategic orientation of the Ringier Group.

With the "SPEAK" format, Ringier has fundamentally rethought its annual reporting: away from a classic top-down update and towards a hybrid storytelling format. In the 2025 edition, Group CFO Dr. Annabella Bassler presented the key financial figures for 2024, while CEO Marc Walder positioned transformation as an integral part of Ringier's DNA - with a clear focus on artificial intelligence and AI agents.

Beyond the content, the particular strength of the project lay in its communicative and visual architecture. Data and classification, strategy and management perspective as well as information and dialog were deliberately linked and visually translated. More than 6,000 employees were involved live in the Corso cinema in Zurich and worldwide via livestream. "SPEAK" thus became a shared experience rather than a one-sided information event - and positioned Corporate Communications as a strategic bridge between corporate management and the organization.

Winning the European Excellence Award 2025 in the newly created category "Executive Communications & Positioning" underlines Corporate Communications at Ringier as a strategic management function and an important contribution to the company's sustainable value creation.