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Advertising innovations - newspapers

9 Mar 2010

The World Newspaper Advertising Conference, held late last week in Copenhagen, Denmark, looked at innovative advertising practices employed by newspapers globally to open up new revenue possibilities. The conference examined new trends and some unusual projects that show how flexible newspapers can be.

Two major themes emerged from the conference, organised by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA): better audience and advertising effectiveness research is essential, and the traditional business model for newspapers gaining revenue from advertising and sales can be enhanced in a modern media company.

Example:

In Portugal, where the property market has collapsed, developers have no money for advertising. So Impresa Classificados returned to a barter economy exchanging a €300,000 advertising campaign for a three-room apartment, which is promptly offered in a lottery. People registered through a special number and paid 72 cents per call raising €300,000 in net revenue for the newspaper company. "So, in the end, we managed an income that corresponds to the real value of the campaign," said Geert Van Hassal, managing director of Impresa Classificados.

In the Czech Republic, the chain of hyper-local Nase Adresa weeklies and websites are supported, in part, by a chain of "news cafés" that serve as the offices of its editors. Those cafés also provide 18% of total revenue. "It's not because we like coffee so much that we created this chain of cafés. It's because we saw a potential revenue stream," said Bozena Rezabova, marketing director for PPF, the parent company of Nase Adresa.

The accepted online advertising metric of clickthroughs is "fatally flawed" and should be replaced with measures that better reflect brand recognition and return on investment, said Matthew Dodd, vice president for Research and Analytics for Nielsen Online's EMEA. "There is zero correlation between clickthrough and ROI. The clickthrough measure is anachronistic. So why do we continue to use it? Because we're lazy, because brand owners are lazy. We're working to move brand owners away from that measure."

Discussions about how they interact with online advertising played a large role in the conference, with several presentations focused on new, more effective ways to measure media reach and advertising effectiveness. One of them, the Touchpoints survey in the United Kingdom, combines information about consumer behaviour with usage data from both online and offline media.

The result is a detailed picture that allows accurate targetting of people during the day, and an understanding of how they use media at any time "What they're doing, who they're with, how much time they spend in single and multiple activities the whole depth and breadth of real life," said Belinda Beeftink, associate director for Media Research at the Institute of Practioners in Advertising in London.

Newspapers are learning to engage with social networks and even creating their own to take advantage of the new web ecosystem. They're also finding alternatives to Google for successful advertising solutions on the web. "You don't need to wait for Google to eat more of your lunch, you can do it yourself," said Moritz Wuttke, founder of NextMedia Initiatives and former CEO of Publicitas in Asia and China. He provided conference participants with advice on how to develop sales channels, pricing methodologies, research and development, contextual and local advertising, and sticky content.

Summaries of all presentations at the conference, which drew publishers, advertising directors and other senior newspaper executives from nearly 40 countries, can be found at www.wan-press.org/advertising2010/home.php.