BBC, The Guardian and IPC all win at AOP awards

by Staff, Brand Republic 05-Oct-06, 11:00

LONDON - BBC Worldwide's TopGear.com won the award for Consumer Website 2006 while The Guardian's innovative blog site CommentIsFree also won at the Association of Online Publishers Awards last night.

TopGear was commended for strong growth in revenue and traffic to the site over the last 12 months, and judges described the site as "perfectly targeting an audience that is expanding at an incredible rate".

The BBC won another award for its Chelsea Flower Show microsite, by bagging the Cross-Media Project 2006. Rival Channel 4 was rewarded for adding value with strong digital extensions to broadcast brands, with Channel4's LostUntold microsite.

As well as winning for CommentIsFree, the Guardian picked up award for Online Advertising Sales Team.

The awards, now in their fifth year, were held at the London Hilton on Park Lane and were hosted by comedian Jimmy Carr. They followed the annual AOP Online Publishing Conference, themed Content Evolution.

Other awards went to Gazetteers.com, an online resource for UK travel agencies published by Reed Business Information. It won the AOP award for Business Website 2006.

NME.com, which recently celebrated its 10th birthday, won the chairman's award. It was praised by Simon Waldman, Guardian Media Group director of digital strategy, as being "among the first magazine brands to make the digital 'leap' a decade ago and had held its own throughout".

Waldman took over chairmanship of the AOP from Haymarket's Bill Murray yesterday.

The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music scooped two awards, for launch and for innovation, for its groundbreaking new launch, SoundJunction.org.

The Sun Online won the AOP award for commercial partnership, for its launch of SunBingo.co.uk with Tombola, which judges described as "simple, sustainable, enjoyable and hugely profitable".

Nature Publishing Group won the award for use of new digital platform, for its adaptation of Google Earth technology to build an online resource on the spread of the Avian Flu virus.

The winners of the award for Online Advertising Campaign 2006 were digital agencies I-Level and Profero, for their hard-hitting Smart Online campaign to promote child safety on the internet.

Associated Northcliffe Digital won the AOP award for Consumer Online Publisher of the year.

Reports firm E-Consultancy won Online Publisher Business, and also Editorial Team Business for E-consultancy.com.

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