This year’s AOP was an interesting event. These are the points some of the speakers made that I found most thought-provoking, amusing, controversial etc. Some new, some old, some borrowed, some blue… This is not an exhaustive list and if I’ve slightly misquoted then apologies (please get in touch if you feel something should be corrected). Some of it is blatantly paraphrased. Some comments from me in [ ].

David Gilbertson:

Most media has an advertising not a content culture

Is your content really “must have” or just nice to have?

Quite interesting is not enough.

News is always urgent but not always important (and people pay for important)

Shawn Colo

Content is marketing

Social optimization will become more important than SEO

People pay for a combination of voice and product experience [it’s not just the content but how you consume it that matters]

Chris Cramer

CPA – continuous partial attention

Social information is information of the first resort

It’s not multimedia, it’s media.

AOP content and trends census

People expect to charge for apps on mobiles [Don’t build your whole business model on this. Things sometimes start out expensive and become cheap as competition gets tougher. Cheap or free. And look what happened to apps on Facebook.]

Luke Bradley Jones

There are not enough advertising dollars in the world to support the Internet [Maybe not currently but spend is growing (it’s overtaken TV in the UK) and targetting of ads can only get better. If it works people will spend money on it. Our challenge is to make advertising work online. Are we spending enough time and energy on this problem or are we spending more time worrying about how journalist’s jobs are changing?]

Dominic Feltham

There’s a whole business in optimising sites for subscriptions

Andrew Langhoff

Don’t forget the customer service and related issues [if you’re planning on charging for content]. Charging for content is a complex business

Bill Murray

You have to add value to the consumption of content. The experience and functionality is important.

Simon Francis

Look for “big content ideas” that work across different media

Idea leadership not idea ownership

The holy grail is loyalty beyond reason

David Montgomery

Editors-in-chief should be replaced by content directors. [Yes, but many sites are already doing this – this is the model MSN uses for instance – and it’s not enough to ensure profitability and save local media. There’s still a huge issue with funding the content through advertising, whether search, display or classified. Incidentally, the likes of eBay and Autotrader have all but destroyed local media’s business model. What’s to be done about that?]

We pay more for coffee than we do for content [The implication is that content is more important to us than coffee so we’ll pay more for it. £2.00 for a latte or a sports report. Is content more valuable than coffee? Not so sure everyone will feel the same way.]