Newspaper Ad Conference to discuss hyper-locals

Roman Gallo

Gallo, the director of media strategies for PPF Group, will explain the project's advertising model, and other new revenue generating innovations. Nase Adresa, launched in the spring of 2009, has been hailed as one of the industry¹s most innovative initiatives in years.

The project is built around weekly print editions, which are exclusive to areas with a maximum of only 30,000 inhabitants, and are feeding their own hyper-local web pages. The objective, within the next three years, is to publish 200 different hyper-local weeklies in the Czech Republic, providing a national platform for advertisers. All Nase Adresa¹s current seven editions have quickly become the bestselling newspapers in their respective areas.

The weeklies' local reporting teams are based in newscafés, which constitute a major innovative dimension of the project. This combination of newsrooms and Internet bistros is designed to facilitate contacts with readers and potential sources.

Other confirmed speakers include:

• Michael Paustian, the deputy editor-in-chief of Bild, Europe's largest newspaper, which is a leader in user-generated content, and user-generated advertising strategies. Bild has created an advertising portal on bild.de where users upload, manage and pay for their own advertisements. Paustian's presentation will examine the advertising portal, "Bild Dir Deine Werbung", which was launched with Germany's biggest pitch in advertising history.

• Annelies Van Den Belt, group CEO of Russian-based SUP Fabrik, an online media company that includes an online sales house which sells both Russian and foreign media sites including Yahoo, the BBC, and a number of newspaper sites. Van Den Belt, who is the former digital media director for News International and new media director for the Telegraph Group in the UK, will participate in a session that provides an economic outlook for advertising, and will also co-chair the conference.

• Moritz Wuttke, CEO and founder of NextMediaInitiatives, based in China and Switzerland, and the former CEO for Publicitas in Asia and China, whose presentation will focus on the impact of Google and Yahoo on the online advertising market and what publishers can do to increase their online ad revenues.

• Ross Biggam, the director general of the Association of Commercial Television in Europe (ACT), who will present lessons and advertising strategies from the television industry as it undergoes transformation in the multimedia age.

• John Bradshaw, CEO of MFA in the United Kingdom and Portugal, which provides digital services to newspaper groups, who will examine hyper-local and social network advertising opportunities.

• Mark Rix, CEO of Associated Newspapers' Dubai subsidiary, Catchpole Communications, the publisher of 7 Days, and former managing director of MEN Media Ltd. in the United Kingdom, who will take part in a training and development panel discussion. Other panellists include Lynn Cunningham, human resources director of Telegraph Media Group, Eamonn Byrne, business director at WAN-IFRA, Paustian, and Van Den Belt.

Full conference details, including registration information, can be found at www.wan-press.org/advertising2010.