Another excellent event from the Westminster eForum series, particularly good as you get a lot of people with legal and regulatory outlooks, rather than simply commercial or technical. Also, unlike most events, participants really are expressing perspectives, rather than trying to sell you something.
The main take-homes were:
Online marketing generally up, +14% in terms of revenue comparing H1 2011 with H1 2010. 1m more active users in UK. Social media display and video both massive growers.
Aggregation is a trend not just seen in the media space area (e.g. networks, DSPs, exchanges etc) but also in selling (e.g. letting GroupOn etc find your customers) and content. Content aggregators such as Flipboard and Pulse (also Zite) seem very interesting indeed as business models where the content is stripped from the 'destination' website, to aggregate it according to the whims of the user. This means an entirely new channel which needs to be exploited by the advertiser.
Some vocal challenge to the very existence of the ASA (a panelist expressing a devil's advocate view). Very interesting observations on it being effectively an arm of enforcing government policy (i.e. not self-regulation), but which the industry pays for.
Information Commissioner Chris Graham gave his usual clear view of things, untroubled by commercial exigencies. A fair point, that the law is the law, the industry can stop lobbying now and get on with complying.
Head of EU ICT Policy for the DCMS, Nigel Hickson, did (not surprisingly, but none the less worryingly) have a very different view of what the industry needs to do, stating that DCMS was proud of the IAB's activity in progressing the opt-in cookie debate. He also expressed confusion as to what the A29WP's function was anyway in a democracy, and opined that left to them, there would be no e-commerce or indeed Internet.
This has been very thoroughly covered at Silicon.com. My thoughts on what the industry should actually do now will follow in a subsequent post.
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