AOP Association of Online Publishers

After two great days of discussions at #AOPTechTalk this week, we’ve created a report to make sure you’ve got all the information you need at your fingertips: https://lnkd.in/eABpTAjZ The report contains detailed write-ups of the conversations held on Wednesday and Thursday, as well as insights from our expert partners. To give you a little flavour of what you’ll discover in the report, take a peek at our key takeaways from yesterday’s session, ‘Artificial Intelligence x Human Innovation: Understanding the future of digital publishing – sponsored by Google’: ⚡ There is a real opportunity to build the future on the back of publisher consent, publisher audiences, and publisher data – but to reach the buyside, we need partners, facilitation, enrichment, and data linkage. ⚡ Authentic human expertise defines us as quality publishers. It’s our greatest strength, and to succeed in the new AI era, we need to lean into this. ⚡ It’s about balancing the threat and opportunity that AI creates. On the one hand, publishers now need to defend their intellectual property like never before, whilst also ensuring that they’re not publishing misinformation or content that’s been scraped by an AI tool to maintain a high level of quality. On the flip side, the new tools also provide a means for publishers to rapidly repurpose content, create personalised experiences, and more. ⚡ Build for the future – you need a vision of where you’re going. Innovation is the only way to fight back against increasing competition and to be prepared for the next big industry development. ⚡ AI can be a powerful productivity tool, but you need to bring your teams along with you to ensure they embrace it. It’s about AI-assistance, not AI-creation. ⚡ AI is freeing journalists up from the mundane, news churn tasks that are needed to backfill sites and serve the needs of our audience. This means that apprentice journalists can join senior reporters on the ground to get the training, ensuring that the next generation of reporters have the skills they needed to thrive and succeed. Download the free report here for more information: https://lnkd.in/eABpTAjZ Thank you to all our wonderful speakers: Alastair Lewis, Quested Consulting Ltd 🚀 Daniël Rood, Google Paul Newman, Future Alice Ting, dmg media JJ Shaw, Lewis Silkin Chris Dicker, CANDR Media Group Robin Booth, emap Jody Doherty-Cove, Newsquest Media Group Roxanne Fisher, Immediate Thank you as well to our host partner, Google, for sponsoring the day’s discussions, and to our partners at EX.CO who hosted digital publishers for a working lunch to explore how publishers can unlock video revenue. We look forward to continuing the conversations with two days diving into data at #AOPTechTalk next week. #digitalpublishing #digitalmedia #artificialintelligence

This week we’ve been at #AOPTechTalk, hearing from the industry experts who are building the next era of great digital publishing products. With so many great insights shared, we’ve captured learnings from the two days’ discussions in an exclusive free report here: https://lnkd.in/eABpTAjZ The report contains detailed write-ups of the conversations held on Wednesday and Thursday, as well as insights from our expert partners. Here are our key takeaways from Wednesday's discussion on 'Technology: Transforming the future of product development - sponsored by Experian' to give you a little taste of what you'll find in this free report: ⚡ There is a real opportunity to build the future on the back of publisher consent, publisher audiences, and publisher data – but to reach the buyside, we need partners, facilitation, enrichment, and data linkage. ⚡ Cross-team collaboration is essential to delivering great product development. Work progresses quicker when everyone is working towards the same goals. ⚡ Keep your eyes on the prize. Have clear KPIs that you’re working towards as a north star for your product development to keep your team on track and to prevent development being waylaid by hundreds of different individual requirements. Don’t lose sight of the big picture. ⚡ As more advertisers publish science-based targets, there’s an urgent need for publishers to showcase their own sustainable credentials. From reducing page load times to being more targeted with how you serve adverts, publishers need to reduce carbon across the board. ⚡ If you build it, they might not come – unless you are guided by audience insight. Build your product based on deep and clear audience insight, not what you think the market needs, and you’ll have a product that your audience will buy in to. ⚡ Don’t be afraid to trial platforms. It’s hard to predict where growth and engagement will come from, so make sure that you’re exploring a variety of channels so that you’re ready to adapt and evolve with changing user behaviour. Download the free report here for more information: https://lnkd.in/eABpTAjZ Thank you to all our wonderful speakers: Ranj Begley, Readly Bedir Aydemir, The Sun Sarah Robertson, Experian John Markey, William Reed Ltd Rachael Miller, William Reed Ltd Alex Newberry, Content Ignite® Simon Taylor, Duration Media LLC. Felix Amoah, kanea Tommy Cattell, DAX Rachel Holsgrove, Octave Tom Gunter, Avid Collective Sipho Kings, The Continent News Laurence Mozafari, Digital Spy Thank you as well to our host partners, Experian, for sponsoring the day's discussion, as well as to our event partners at Content Ignite®, Duration Media LLC., and Avid Collective for their support. We look forward to continuing the conversations with two days diving into data at #AOPTechTalk next week. #digitalpublishing #digitalmedia #productdevelopment

One of our speakers was unfortunately unable to join us today at #AOPTechTalk, but we were delighted to have Chris Dicker, CANDR Media Group, to talk us through By Gamers For Gamers’ latest initiative. While there are multiple tools that will check for AI usage, they typically provide different results and look for different markers. BGFG has created a tool that aggregates eight of these checkers, to create a consistent confidence score so you can identify when AI has been used to write an article. As well as solving an internal problem, it has also provided another valuable revenue stream for BGFG which can be taken to market. Last, but certainly not least, we also heard Robin Booth, emap, Jody Doherty-Cove, Newsquest Media Group, and Roxanne Fisher, Immediate, understand what the commercial possibilities are of AI-driven product development. AI is a powerful productivity tool, but we need to start talking about AI-assistance rather than AI-generation. We have the power to plug gaps your editorial team can’t cover and to free your journalists from re-writing press releases, but we will always have that level of human oversight to ensure quality. This also means that apprentice journalists can earn their stripes working on-the-ground and learning from senior colleagues rather than handling the necessary news churn content. It’s about working with your teams to understand how AI can help alleviate their pain points, and providing them the opportunity to play with these new tools, rather than enforcing an approach top-down. That's a wrap for the first week of #AOPTechTalk, but we'll be back tomorrow with our key takeaways, a special report wrapping up the week's discussions and providing additional insights from our expert partners. Keep your eye out for the report tomorrow! Thank you to Google for sponsoring today's #AOPTechTalk discussion, and to Alastair Lewis, Quested Consulting Ltd, for moderating the conversations so expertly. https://lnkd.in/ecMA-pB2

Future’s Paul Newman took to the #AOPTechTalk stage to talk us through how they relaunched TechRadar with a user-first approach and a deliberate emphasis on human experience. In an era of generative AI, it is human expertise that make our brands – we need to lean into this. Along with a detailed overview of the work they’d undertaken to reinvigorate their brand, Paul shared five key learnings for publishers: 💡 You’re never doing as well as you think you are at the peak of your performance, and you’re never doing as badly as you think you are at the trough. Focus on what you can control and the core reason you exist – the other problems can be fixed in the background. 💡 Sites need to be fighting fit for this brave new world of AI. Make sure you’re doing the basics well to drive audience to your site. 💡 Build for the future – you need a vision of where you’re going. 💡 Innovation is the only way to fight back against increasing competition. 💡 Understand the needs of your readers and make sure you’re satisfying them. We also heard from Alice Ting, dmg media, and JJ Shaw, Lewis Silkin LLP, to understand what publishers can do to protect their IP and content assets from AI platforms. One of the challenges that publishers are facing is that the law is different depending on region. UK legislation states that you can’t text or data mine unless it’s for non-commercial research purposes, but the EU legislation also includes an allowance for text and data mining unless the owner has opted out by appropriate means. The US has different legislation again based on how transformative the use is, meaning that publishers need to respond to multiple fronts and understand how and where they can make claims. However, there are some clear steps that publishers can take to protect their content. Firstly, know what you own and what you have copyright of. Secondly, update your terms of use on a regular basis to make sure that the contract a person or bot makes with you by entering the site prevents scraping; looking at the larger publishers to see what they’re saying can be a good way to begin here. Likewise, staying up to date with your robots.txt and other applicable software is essential. Finally, if someone is taking your content, make sure that you take action; write cease and desist letters so that there is a clear trail demonstrating that you’re taking tangible action and not just turning the other cheek. https://lnkd.in/ecMA-pB2 Thank you to Google for joining us as host partners for today's #AOPTechTalk discussion. #digitalpublishing #digitalmedia #artificialintelligence

We started off the morning discussions at #AOPTechTalk by hearing from Google’s 🚀 Daniël Rood to discover how Google Vertex can support publishers to improve monetisation. The reality is that change is here. Generative AI has fundamentally changed the way that we search, but it’s also opened opportunities, including purchasing items seen in a video or querying English articles in your native language. Daniel took delegates through a demo on the capabilities of Google Vertex, such as how it can be integrated into your site search to provide a more personalised search experience, serving the most relevant results from your content for a query. Models can be tweaked to present results in your editorial style – even in the style of William Shakespeare! These capabilities are applied to publisher content, but aren’t ‘learning’ from it, ensuring proprietary control of your content. https://lnkd.in/ecMA-pB2

We’re back in London for #AOPTechTalk, this time looking at ‘Artificial Intelligence x human innovation: Understanding the future of digital publishing’ – sponsored today by our partners at Google! Looking forward to a great day of discussions, moderated by Alastair Lewis, Quested Consulting Ltd. We’re also going to join EX.CO for a roundtable lunch after the discussion to explore how publishers can unlock video revenue and what strategies publishers are successfully adopting to leverage their video content. Watch this space for our takeaways!

Brand content is a unique channel that publishers can provide. At #AOPTechTalk today, Tom Gunter, Avid Collective, walked us through how they’re supporting publishers in unlocking growth in this area, including making it more efficient to produce content, making it more accessible for advertisers to understand what they’re buying, and making it more competitive by helping with measurement, amplification, and scale. Finally – but certainly not least – we also heard from Sipho Kings, The Continent News, and Laurence Mozafari, Digital Spy, to discover how publishers can leverage WhatsApp to engage with audiences. The Continent News is a WhatsApp-first news brand, delivering PDF newsletters to an engaged audience directly on the platform. The key is in re-thinking what newspapers look like in the 21st century, rather than retro-fitting a print newspaper into a digital environment – which is why the Continent News ensure they only have 300 words on a page, and 30 pages in an edition. People live and work on their phones; being able to meet people with where they’re already spending time is hugely valuable, and it creates a channel to connect directly with your audience. The Digital Spy is also using WhatsApp as one of their channels. WhatsApp can deliver a super-engaged channel to activate your audience, but it’s important to have a defined purpose for your channel. Finding a blend of editorial posts that link back to your website and native posts that create opportunities to engage within WhatsApp can be really valuable. https://lnkd.in/gTXf9XAk A huge thank you to Ranj Begley, Readly, for guiding our discussion so expertly as our moderator, and to our #AOPTechTalk host partner, Experian, for their support of the event. #digitalpublishing #digitalmedia #WhatsApp #brandedcontent

The ad industry is making a push for greater sustainability across the supply chain. Simon Taylor, Duration Media LLC., unpacked how their product, Sequency, is reducing data waste in advertising, whilst finding new revenue for publishers. Sequency provides GAM with real-time viewability intelligence which generates low-carbon impressions, it’s easy to implement with no code on page, and it will only trigger one bid request, eliminating data waste and reducing carbon emissions at the impression level. Following on from that, we also hear from Felix Amoah, kanea, Tommy Cattell, DAX, and Rachel Holsgrove, Octave, to explore how publishers are implementing innovations in audio to create new opportunities for monetisation. Audio listening is a fascinating insight into the interests and passions of users, opening the door to targeting on an interest basis rather than demographics. By pairing this first-party data you have with machine learning, you can build out those interest categories to create something that is of real value to advertisers. However, we need collaboration across the industry and to share learnings and best practice in order to grow audio’s share of the market and to educate advertisers on what is possible in the audio space. https://lnkd.in/gTXf9XAk Thank you to Experian, our host partner for today's #AOPTechTalk session. #digitalpublishing #digitalmedia #audio #sustainability #advertising

Rachael Miller and John Markey of William Reed Ltd took to the stage at #AOPTechTalk to share learnings from the success of the World’s 50 Best editorial product and how they transformed an event-first brand into a year-round digital presence. However, this also required a culture shift. Internally, teams had to adapt to an agile, iterative approach to product development, which initially sat at odds to the waterfall approach which was a legacy of their print days. Likewise, it was essential to have a collaborative work environment. Success was driven by having a harmonious team that are empowered to make decisions against clear KPIs and by ensuring that individuals have the right tools, data, and accountability available to them as part of their role. Ultimately, this led to increased revenue, greater understanding of their audience, and a more sustainable website. And their template-driven approach means that creating new websites now takes a matter of weeks rather than months. We also heard from Alex Newberry, Content Ignite®, who gave us a speed tour of their new Fusion Platform. Publishers work within complex ecosystems with lots of integration types and partners across different markets – Fusion takes care of the heavy lifting, simplifying ad tech stacks and allowing you to get up, running, and earning revenue. Thank you to Experian for joining us as host partners for today’s #AOPTechTalk session. https://lnkd.in/gTXf9XAk #digitalpublishing #digitalmedia #productdevelopment #revenue

Our moderator Ranj Begley, Readly, kicked off the first day of #AOPTechTalk, before passing over to Experian’s Sarah Robertson and The Sun’s Bedir Aydemir to outline the challenges we’re facing as an industry around identity and audience. When the demise of the third-party cookie was first announced, there was a lot of energy around the idea of publishers leveraging the strength of their first party data to fill the gap. However, the reality is that we’ve not seen this shift in behaviour from the buyside. There is a real opportunity to build the future on the back of publisher consent, publisher audiences, and publisher data – but to reach the buyside, we need partners, facilitation, enrichment, and data linkage.   Using partners like Experian opens the door to exciting things around measurement and attribution, and to build more complex segments around unknown and repeat audiences where there are gaps in first-party data. We’re not going to win on CTR; instead, publishers need to show impact on brand awareness and purchase further down the funnel. https://lnkd.in/gTXf9XAk #digitalpublishing #digitalmedia #product #data #firstpartydata #thirdpartydata