Sky has announced a £1m AdSmart SME Support Scheme to help businesses in the Covid-19 pandemic. The SME100 will provide 100 businesses with TV advertising campaigns, as the scheme is open to any SMEs that have been running for at least a year in the UK, with between 2 and 50 full-time employees. They must also be new to TV, or haven’t been on air for 12 months. The campaigns will be delivered via AdSmart, the market leading addressable TV platform, that easily enables brands to advertise on TV by focusing on the audiences that matter to them. You can read more about it here.

Following an update to the longstanding ABC audit system, it is no longer mandatory that UK national newspapers make their print circulations public. As a result, News UK the publisher of the Sun and Times titles, has opted to make its circulation figures private – only agencies who have signed a confidentiality agreement can see them. News UK will instead shift its focus to PAMCo, which measures total reach across mobile, tablet, PC and print. The Telegraph also pulled out of the ABC audit as part of its strategy to focus on digital. The publisher said the ABC metric was not the key metric behind its subscription strategy and “not how we measure our success”. Learn more here.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have fronted a broadcast running across every UK radio station – including commercial, community and BBC stations – highlighting the importance of talking about our mental health during the coronavirus pandemic. The “Mental health minute’ took place on May 19^th with listeners expected to reach more than 20 million. The campaign was led by Radiocentre and Heads Together, the mental health initiative coordinated by The Royal Foundation. The royals were joined by England football captain Harry Kane, singer-songwriter Dua Lipa, actor David Tennant and heavyweight champion boxer Anthony Joshua for the campaign to mark the start of Mental Health Awareness Week. Read more about it here.

National Gallery takes art to the streets through partnering with Ocean Outdoor. The campaign sees work by Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet and Jan van Eyck appearing across Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Southampton to experience some of the best works from behind the Gallery’s temporarily closed doors. You can read more about it here.

Finally, the media team at Boutique spotted an opportunity for a fun piece of reactive advertising this month. After a story was published by the Mail Online about a famous woman doing her shopping at Costcutter, we quickly arranged for ads to appear around the article promoting the latest offers available in store. Thanks to the team at Mail Online, we were able to surprise our client with incremental reach for their latest offers campaign alongside creating a cheeky tie-in with an unsuspecting celebrity shopper!