The 21st World Newspaper Advertising Conference, organised by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, was held last week in Malta.

The two day conference, sponsored by timesofmalta.com, attracted about 200 delegates from Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. It was aimed at helping advertising professionals to maximise their share of a smaller market, provide ideas for new revenues and formulate strategies for increasing existing revenues and yields.

The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, or WAN-IFRA, is the global organisation of the world’s press, representing more than 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120 countries.

The conference was addressed by a large number of delegates, including Adrian Hillman, executive director of Allied Newspapers, who said that newspaper companies need to play to their unique strengths to generate advertising.

“It is important to have our news pumped to every available electronic device. Advertisers will latch on to this. However, the demand for print is still growing because we have a spectrum of products to offer our client. We’re generating more belief in print, and more belief in our organisation,” Mr Hillman said.

The Times of Malta, he said, has undertaken a portfolio strategy to offer advertisers and readers alike a range of publications, both in print and online. These include a range of targeted magazines – for young women, men and families – inserted in the newspaper. It also prints and distributes third-party magazines – a counter-intuitive strategy since they compete with the core products, but they provide additional revenue from printing and distribution. And it is, of course, developing its digital products as well.

“What we believe is that you build on the strengths you have,” Mr Hillman said. “In the case of the Times of Malta, it is distribution, printing, and the design offering, but above all it is the position of the newspaper and our credibility.”

Deep thinking is undervalued in our societies, according to Lindsay Zaltman, managing director of Olson Zaltman Associates, a research-based marketing strategy firm in the United States.

“A lack of deep thinking permeates the entire business world,” he said. “They’re all rewarding people for short-term thinking. So our days are full of endless meetings and e-mails – where is the time for deep thinking? It’s just not valued in our society and needs to be.”

Mr Zaltman believes that deep thinking is needed to develop better ways to measure advertising success, as he also believes the traditional measures such as reach and frequency are no longer working.

He believes a focus on engagement and on what he calls “co-creation” – an understanding of how messages merge with the mind of the recipient – is needed. He says businesses should understand consumers so well that they know what they want even if the consumers don’t.

“Things they can’t articulate, you can design around because you know them so well. That’s the level of knowledge you need of your consumer,” he said.

In a wide-ranging presentation that delved into the work of “neuro-marketing firms” and brain research, Mr Zaltman examined the importance of understanding how consumers use metaphors as a tool to learning what works.

“About 95 per cent of human thought is unconscious, but so much of what makes a successful campaign is coming from this deeper level, understanding what’s happening in the unconscious, what’s going on at a deep level with your consumers,” he said.

Anders Berglund, sales director of Aftonbladet, the largest daily in Sweden, said his newspaper has a good mix of revenues from print and online, and reaches more people than ever before, 2.5 million readers and users a day in a country of nine million. Advertising revenues are split 50-50 between print and online, and print sales still provide the majority of revenue.

But the development of mobile platforms – both smartphones and tablets – is again changing the landscape, and faster than the changes that came before.

Though this “second wave” of digital has many advantages for newspaper companies – it is mobile, attractive and less free – it also has enormous challenges. The primary problem is that consumers are using them for new competitors like Facebook, Spotify and other digital pure-players, he said.

“We’re trying to develop products where we get paid for content, but it isn’t easy,” he said. “We’re seeing a shift from using the old services to all these great mobile services, and it’s a tough challenge. In this case, they aren’t using a normal news service or a newspaper.”

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t develop new mobile products – just accept that not all of them will work. Mr Berglund had these recommendations: Experiment. “We have to continue to develop new products, but not all of them will work. Five of them may fail, but we hope that two, three, four will succeed.”

Continue to develop print products, which will provide the bulk of revenue for some years to come: “We’re still connected to the print product, and you can make a lot of money from print,” Mr Berglund said. “It’s important to have a focus on interesting new launches and new products, but also continue to develop established products. Try new design, selling in new ways, try to maximise the value.”

Create events like music concerts (both live and digitally) and fashion shows: “It’s a great way for Aftonbladet to meet readers, but it’s also great when it comes to advertisers.”

Benoy Roychowdhury, executive director of marketing for The Hindustan Times, India’s second largest media group, said advertisers were hard hit by the global economic downturn, so the newspaper developed an alternative to cash payments: it took a stake in their businesses.

“We now have a significant portfolio of investments that helped us build our revenue,” he said.

India’s newspaper growth is well-known, but not all is rosy. Though affluence and the consuming class are growing, so is the youth population, which doesn’t read newspapers. Forty per cent of the country’s population is below the age of 18.

Mr Roychowdhury presented a case study of how The Hindustan Times has maintained its impressive print growth in challenging times. This includes: Investing in readership by launching targeted publications like financial journals, expanding into more affluent regional areas with local language newspapers, and launching youth editions in the cities;

Creating new revenue opportunities, like the strategic partnerships with advertisers; Providing marketing solutions to advertisers rather than just selling space, and hiring staff that has a marketing orientation; Collaborating with other companies; And delivering content across multiple platforms other than print.

Altug Acar, deputy head of advertising for the Turkish daily Hürriyet, said that in 2009 the nationwide broadsheet with a weekday circulation of 420,000 decided to create a virtual auto fair through a special website.

He said the main objectives behind the project were to generate additional advertising revenue and to contribute to the sales activities of automobile manufacturers.

On the first day of the virtual fair, Hürriyet’s automotive supplement devoted a special edition to it. Visitors to the online fair were able to gather detailed information, photographs and videos of various makes and models.

The first fair was a major success, drawing 410,000 unique visitors and some 530,000 total visitors and all participating clients applauded the project. In fact, Mr Acar said it was such a big success that a sponsor was found for the second fair in 2010.

In the second year, he says the numbers were down slightly, but still drew 370,000 unique visitors and 420,000 total visitors. Plans are in place to offer the auto fair again this year, he said.

Ann Lown, head of digital partnerships for Archant Regional in the UK, spoke about how to bring obituaries into the digital age. She admitted that she had once argued that birth, death and marriage notices in print had to be defended from digital incursion at all costs. “How wrong can one person be?” she asked.

Though Archant still has a good business of these adverts in print, Ms Lown, the chair of the Malta conference, showed how her company has brought these adverts into the digital age, making the best use of the interactivity of digital platforms.

Unlike a static newspaper obituary, Archant’s familynotices24 allows mourners to post tributes, condolence messages, photos and videos, light digital “candles” and generally add to the information about the deceased.

Though Archant also offers family announcements for happier occasions – births, weddings, anniversaries and the like – three-quarters of all use involves the death notices. Nevertheless, the “happy” notices are important, as readers can be encouraged to advertise more.

The audience for familynotices24 is 82 per cent female, with three-quarters finding the service “good to excellent” and nearly all saying it is a good addition to print.

And while obituaries are by nature sad, Archant is clearly providing a useful and popular service: it has 125,000 notices on the site, with a monthly average of around 55,000 unique visitors and 580,000 page impressions per month. And it has been lucrative as well; familynotices24 generated £500,000 in new revenue the first year, and £600,000 in 2010.

“This is revenue on top of revenue we were already bringing in, this is revenue from online only,” Ms Lown said.

Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics and an industry analyst, said he believed 2011 offers the newspaper industry another shot at succeeding in the digital world.

This is the year the paid content model will really be tested, he said. “By July 1, we will have six or seven dozen, pushing toward 100, tests of paid content in the United States and Europe.”

The New York Times’ metered model, to be introduced shortly, will be watched by the industry with great interest. Mr Doctor described such models – which ask for payment from those who access many pages but leave occasional users with free access – as “making peace with fly-by traffic.”

The New York Times has 30 million readers online, so even if they get just three per cent to pay, they’ll equal their paper subscription number. In general, 10 per cent of readers provide a third to one half of all page views, Mr Doctor said.

That is a very valuable audience for advertisers – “they can get sophisticated targeting using the declared data,” he said. “You know who they are, where they live, you might know where they work, you know about their shopping habits online. That results in an incredible profile to target advertising and selling that at a higher rate.”

At the same time, the model does not reduce the large traffic generated by free content, as only the heaviest users will be charged. “There is a core readership that they want to pay, but the majority won’t run into a pay wall, they won’t even know that it’s a pay site,” he said.

Gregor Waller, vice president for strategy & innovation for Axel Springer’s Welt Group in Germany, believes mega-trends will continue to dramatically change the advertising business, adding that newspaper companies need to react more quickly to shifting consumer behaviour.

Here are some of those trends:

Digital reading, driven by smartphones: In 2000, only two per cent of respondents in a Financial Times survey said they could imagine reading only digital content in future; that number rose to 37 per cent in 2010. “We believe that by 2020, every German will own at least one mobile device, and 80 per cent of these devices will be smartphones. This will change everything,” Mr Waller said.

Loss of print circulation and print reach: Axel Springer expects to lose five per cent of circulation per year over the next five years, with a consequent loss of advertising revenue.

Tablet computers: “By 2020, the lead devices will be tablets and smartphones, and step-by-step they will surpass the number of televisions,” Mr Waller said.

The three digital “revolutions” – the “first web,” where monetisation opportunities were largely unexplored, the “social web”, used for personal communication, and the “app web,” which eliminates technical barriers and will draw new customers who are willing to pay.

“The motivation of people going to the social web is completely different from going to the Google web,” said Mr Waller. “It’s like going on the phone, talking to friends. To successfully advertise and sell on the social web, the media industry must deeply understand the motivations driving users into this parallel web,” Mr Waller said.

But advertising alone is not going to provide sufficient revenues, or the revenues lost to print, he said. “We will rely heavily on paid content. If it does not come, our revenues won’t be there in 2020. We have to stop giving content away for free.”

Staffan Hultén, head of research and analysis of Media (RAM) in Sweden whose company does research for 560 publications in 17 countries representing over 300 million readers, showed how advertising effectiveness, measured in recall and clickthroughs, is declining online, and how mobile and tablet devices are providing very positive indications for advertising effectiveness.

For the traditional internet, “clickers are a diminishing breed,” he said. Only two per cent of audience accounts for two-thirds of all clicks, and five per cent of the online audience is responsible for eight out of 10 clicks. The number of people who never click is rising too – from 68 per cent in 2007 to 88 per cent today.

“Click rates aren’t that interesting anymore,” he said. “Visibility and understanding how a certain ad functions is more interesting. The value of a banner ad is so much more than a click. You can be successful online with very low click rates.”

But advertising recall online is diminishing too – websites are more cluttered, adverts are posted for shorter periods, pages are longer, and rigid web design lets people know where not to look if they want to avoid ads.

There are two important variables for advertising success online, Mr Hultén said – frequency and engagement. “Once you get frequent users, you get really high recall. If you don’t have frequent users, you need engagement – those who stay on site for a long time.”

But what is really remarkable is the recall and click rates for advertisements on the iPad.

“We’re in the middle of the honeymoon right now and figures will never be this high again. But they’re extremely high – 80 per cent recall for an ad, 60 per cent for a film, 75 per cent for a travel agency ad. But that’s not what is really remarkable, it’s the 50 per cent click rates. It will become lower, of course. Is it the honeymoon, or is it the solution everyone is looking for? It’s partly because of the honeymoon, but partly because of the technology and the solutions.”

Nils von Heijne, agency director at Pronto Communication, Sweden, spoke on: “Viral marketing: Why care about the social media hype?” He said we are today bombarded with some 3,000 commercial messages each day, adding, “We live in constant noise.”

As a result of this, consumers are becoming immune to commercial advertising, and 90 per cent of the people who can skip TV ads, do so – by zipping, zapping or muting them.

However, Mr von Heijne said, 93 per cent of people perceive word-of-mouth as the most credible source of information about products and services.

While word-of-mouth is nothing new, with the digital world, it can now be tracked and measured, he said.

Almost 50 per cent of consumers feel that they “must” read the reviews of other consumers before they make a purchase, Mr von Heijne said, and added that 59 per cent of European online shoppers change brand preferences after doing online research.

In addition, he said Google loves word-of-mouth, so generating positive word-of-mouth about your brand or product can actually help boost your company’s ranking in search results.

“It’s all about building relationships and doing it in a clever way,” Mr von Heijne said “We look for the most influential people to build those relationships with for whatever the target group is.”

He offered these eight themes to generate engagement and word-of-mouth: Exclusivity; Influencing and being listened to; Flattery and kudos; The personal connection; Create and be awarded; The innovative angle; Adding value; and Fun = Engagement,

Aralynn McMane, executive director for Young Readership Development at the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, spoke on the theme: “Design an ad for the 21st century”.

“My goal today is to add advertising to the mix of what we do to engage young people with our content,” said Dr McMane.

Conference participants received a DVD kit from WAN-IFRA and were encouraged to design an ad for the 21st century. Other publishers may participate in the contest as well (see www.worldpressfreedomday.org)

Dr McMane offered these four reasons why news publishers should participate in this contest: Make some money; Get cross-media ideas from digital natives; Help the young become interested in newspapers and understanding advertising place in a democracy; Help promote press freedom.

Dr. McMane urged participants to aim their efforts towards May 3 – Press Freedom Day. The theme this year is: “Silence kills democracy, but a free press talks.”

Eamonn Byrne, managing director of The Byrne Partnership in the UK, spoke on: “What to do now and what to do next”.

“It’s a good idea to remember the root of your revenue will be the newspaper for some years to come,” he said. “That will change, but what we don’t know is how long it’s going to take for that to happen. One thing I do know is that the money is in print right now.”

Offering a brief round-up of the conference, Mr Byrne suggested several take-away points for participants.

What is fashionable is not necessarily a trend, he says, and a trend is not necessarily fashionable. In addition, while trends are important, fashions tend to be exciting.

He said this needs to be kept in mind because while digital offerings are very fashionable, at this point and time, digital will not provide the kind of revenues needed to support news publishing houses.

“The core of what we do is our content, and that content is extremely expensive, and you’re not going to do it with digital advertising,” he said.

However, he added that print has unique properties that deliver “great bang for your buck.” Because of this, Mr Byrne said media companies should have print at the centre of their digital developments.

“Multi-media with newspapers at the core is both fashionable and a trend,” he says.

Before moving ahead, Mr Byrne said news publishers need to have their advertising sales teams extremely well organised and working efficiently. Just training people to sell will no longer be enough, he adds.

Furthermore, having a mobile strategy is becoming essential.

“I’ve been saying for five years that the mobile revolution is going to happen that year,” Mr Byrne says.

“I don’t know whether it’s going to happen this year or next year, but you can’t afford to take the risk that it won’t happen in the very near future.”

He also pointed out that just because there are massive amounts of money in things such as search advertising it doesn’t mean publishers will ever be able to get very much of that revenue themselves.

“Everything now communicates and everything changes,” Mr Byrne said. “Get over it! Get on with it! And good luck!”