AOP highlights

Here are a couple of highlights from the AOP conference on Wednesday, that already seems a lifetime ago.

Jeff Henry, the director of ITV consumer, ran through the plans for the new ITV.com service, which looked impressive, he also had the luxury of including a clip of Paul Potts from Britain's got talent in his presentation (check the number of views on YouTube), there was barely a dry eye in the house. It made the graphs etc that I had in my e-recruitment presentation look positively pedestrian.

There was a guy from Oodle, standing in for their MD, who talked about Oodle's place in the aggregator market alongside Google and MSN. I didn't know much about them, but have made a mental note to find out more, it looked like they had some clever functionality that allowed users to compare prices across classified listings - maybe better for cars than jobs, but looked good.

Caroline Slootweg (great name) from Unilever talked about the way that they were engaging with online advertising. She gave a case study of In the Motherhood - a US online only sitcom that is written and edited by users online - that they use to promote a shampoo brand - she emphasised that conventional online metrics (ROI, Page Views etc) didn't work for them and that they judged online activity in the same way as offline - brand recall, uplift in sales etc.

I also really like Duncan Edwards, the Chief Exec of Nat Mags, who was very candid about how the company's online strategy had developed from sitting on the fence to buying handbag.com and launching online editions of their consumer magazines.

The conference split into two sessions in the afternoon, with the stream that I was in looking at mobile internet stuff and then e-recruitment, with Felix from Jobsite making a real impact in the e-recruitment session with his one slide presentation - saying that job boards were about three things - balance, mindset and interactivity and that everything else was just cosmetic.

After that there were awards, where everyone drank too much and Enhance Media shared a table with ComScore - who were cool.