RT WINS WEBBY AWARD – ‘OSCARS OF THE INTERNET’ – WITH PROJECT DEDICATED TO 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE END OF WWII

MOSCOW, MAY 19, 2021 – The Endless Letter, RT’s project dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War-Second World War, won the top prize at the Webby Awards, a leading international awards event honoring excellence in digital projects. Members of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) voted for RT, putting it ahead of PBS (USA) and its FRONTLINE project, as well as RTVE (Spain), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC, USA) and other contestants.

“The Webby Awards is considered the most prestigious digital competition in the world – and deservedly so. To receive the top prize from the Academy is a major success. We are proud of the achievement that we share with our artists, colleagues, and partners. Congratulations to everyone who worked on the project and supported us,” said Kirill Karnovich-Valua, creative director at RT.

The Webby Awards top prize in the Social/Features: Best Use of Stories category went to RT’s Endless Letter Instagram project. Endless Letter, created in collaboration with RANEPA School of Art and Design students and professional graphic artists Mikhail Sorkin and Pyotr Bankov, is a series of missives sent from the frontlines during the Great Patriotic War, and illustrations inspired by them.

The project is part of RT’s large-scale social media campaign, #VictoryPages, which tells the story of the Great Patriotic War and World War II across five major new media and digital art platforms: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, VK and YouTube. It has already won recognition at the ADC Awards, Shorty Awards, Red Dot Awards, Lovie Awards and Digiday Awards, and in other international competitions.

RT has won People’s Voice recognitions at the Webby Awards before. In 2020, the virtual reality project Lessons of Auschwitz won in two categories. RT also topped the list of companies whose digital projects put Russia on the International Webby Winner Index 2020 for the first time ever. In 2018, the Academy recognized RT’s #1917LIVE project, an international, historical social media re-enactment dedicated to the Russian Revolution. A group of RT’s digital projects won in 2016.

The Webby Awards, “the internet’s highest honor,” according to the New York Times, annually honor the world’s best digital projects: websites, videos, mobile apps and social media campaigns. The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) that judges the competition has top professionals from the web and media industry as its members. Over 13,000 entries from around the world were submitted this year.