Blog: Working the floor at the 2010 AOP Awards

Last Thursday evening I was at the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) Awards at The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm London.  Sift Media was up for the Specialist Digital Publisher award, but as the guys were hosting a K2 Advisory cloud dinner for some CIOs at The Ritz, I got to work the floor of the awards in North London alone.

The Roundhouse was a welcome change from the usual Park Lane spots (where you always feel so crammed-in) and we looked down on the tables from the gallery as we had drinks.  Not being tied into hosting guests, it was good to nose my way into conversations with people.

Table 2 was lively.  I was beside Mike Butcher who I initially knew in his NMA days, but these days he’s having fun at TechCrunch Europe.  Mike can be relied on to liven up any party, and as our table was split with five ladies/five gents on either side, we switched to boy/girl/boy/girl after the Madagascan prawns.  In this age of speed networking, why on earth don’t awards organisers do this more often.  I enjoy talking to anyone, but with the greatest respect, 30 minutes with some random bloke is enough!  The point being that if there’s a business connection you’ll have made it by then; and without moving around it’s impossible to properly connect with the whole table.

This post is not the time to dwell on the environmental merits or otherwise of eating Madagascan prawns – I will just offer this one link to an article from the Guardian.

I then had the pleasure of sitting between Lucy Palmer and Andy Flint both from ABC.  Lucy didn’t think much of the prawns either (but she was 7 and a half month pregnant).  She & I moved on from the provenance of the prawns to telling tales of our travels in Africa.  It’s not often you meet someone who understands the nuances of travelling overland in Africa, so it was fun to reminisce.  Then it was on to how many countries we’d both visited.  She’s on 83, whereas I’m quite a few behind on 55.  Mind you, my 17 African and 7 Asian countries were achieved at the environmental cost of just one flight!  Lucy, on the subject of the rules, do I get a country for East Germany?  And what about spending 12 hours travelling on a train through Belarus when it was still part of the USSR?

Andy & I meet each other at events quite frequently.  I absolutely respect what they’re doing at ABC, but the fact is that in Sift Media’s B2B world, it’s the deliverables that matter; so ABC hasn’t ever been a necessity.  The more informal side of the chats with Andy hark back to the conversations we had when he was at VNU in 1999 and we got scarily close to completing a joint venture between AccountingWEB and Accountancy Age.  In those days we even owned the domain accountancyage.com!

However many times I go to Awards ceremonies, there’s still something compelling about seeing the winners mount the stage and pump the air.  The Specialist Digital Publisher award was 15^th out of 17 awards.  We had three nominees at Table 2: MyHobbyStore, us and TechCrunch Europe;and across at table 5 there was Simon Dessain from The List, and earlier I’d chatted to Duncan Tickell from Magicalia.  Magicalia got it, and one has to say they are doing some good things; particularly since they de-focussed the magazines they were once running.  In fact, they’re now pretty much back to the old Magicalia that Jeremy and Adam were running before it was bought by Exponent.

What can one say about The Guardian winning 5 categories (Digital Publisher – Consumer, Digital Editorial Individual (Matthew Weaver), Innovation (iPhone app), Launch (Guardian Open Platform) and Use of Video?  I had judged the Innovation category and you just can’t deny what they’ve achieved.  One can however be a little desirous of their almost unlimited funding.  And the irony of their 5 awards on the day after their latest figures showing ‘reduced’ losses of £58m for the year to March 2010 were announced, wasn’t lost on us Table 2 losers!

Whatever one’s view of The Guardian’s (or indeed the BBC’s) business model, one can’t deny there's a wealth of innovation and change coursing through the publishing world.  Roll on next year!