20th World Newspaper Ad Conference: Where will the money come from?

But while the economy will improve, the structural challenges facing the industry are likely to remain. Although digital revenues are growing rapidly as a percentage of overall revenue, they are unlikely to replace or exceed the lost print revenues.

"We have a great future but the future isn't digital on its own ­ it has to be much more than this," said Mr Bryne. "This is out conundrum and why we are here today ­ we are looking for solutions to this problem."

Advertising Solutions for the Fast-Changing Media Environment: Moritz Wuttke, Founder, NextMedia Initiatives, Switzerland/China

There is no doubt that the media environment is changing more rapidly as ever social media and the giant search engines are impacting media,
communication and advertising fundamentally.

Mr Wuttke advocates engaging with the social networks, creating your own, and finding alternatives to Google to find 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 Mr Wuttke, whose wide-ranging presentation provided advice for developing sales channels, pricing methodologies, research and development, contextual and local advertising, and stick content.

Some of his many suggestions:

- Integrate and optimise your ad networks for selling unsold inventory. "There are other companies who are more transparent than Google, will share more revenue with you."

- Develop a simple on-line process for selling advertisements online ­ for print and well as online ads. "People today are used to buying things on-line," said Mr Wuttke. "Make it a simple process for print ads, sell them online, sell them in a bundle with on-line ads."

- Adopt the Google "beta" development model ­ "try things out online and be flexible enough to abandon them if they don't work. "Why not engage your readers and ask them what they like and don¹t like?"

- Integrate Facebook, Digg, contextual advertising and other social networks. "Once you accept you don't own the web, it becomes a question of, 'how can I tap into that (social network) market for people who could become a reader?"

- Create your own social networks, based on archival materials that engage readers ­ photos, historical content, cars, sports etc.

- Develop mobile applications. "There is no Google on that, only publishers," said Mr Wuttke. "Isn't that divine? Isn't that fantastic? Google is completely out of the picture."

- Don't give up your own creativity. "Continue to impact your readers, offline and online."

What we can learn from television: Ross Biggam, General Director, Commercial Television Association Europe (ACT), Belgium

In a presentation titled "Broadcasters' Future Strategies for Advertising (and beyond)," Mr Biggam addressed the issues facing the television industry and how some of these are similar to the situation for newspapers.

TV and newspapers dominate the top two spots for advertising revenue in most European countries, said Mr Biggam, who also noted that TV and newspapers are both based around selling ads based on quality content and putting money back into creating that content.

While newspapers have faced increased competition from free dailies and other start-ups, television has seen explosive growth in the number of TV
outlets. "In 1989, there were 47 channels in Europe, there are now 7,200 European TV channels," he said.

However, despite fragmentation, he said the large audiences are still out there as evidenced by hugely successful sporting events. "People still like to watch TV. The average time consumers spent watching television across Europe is still increasing."

To move forward, Mr Biggam said that for television, there is a clear need to diversify, and he said this can be best achieved in the following three ways:

- Look beyond the 30-second spot: new advertising techniques, product placement and split screen advertising.

- Auxiliary revenues from programmes themselves, such as selling DVDs.

-  Develop families of channels. Rather than having one single broadcast channel, have a family of channels offering specific things, such as a sport channel, comedy channel, movie channel, science fiction channel and so on.

Finally, Mr Biggam said "targeted advertising is the next holy grail for European media," however, regulatory issues make this complicated.

Where advertising will go in 2010 - maybe: Adam Smith, Futures Director, Group M, United Kingdom

Mr Smith, who writes the influential "This Year, Next Year" research series for Group M, opened his presentation by admitting something you rarely hear at an industry conference: his forecasts are not infallible.

Though Group M, owned by Martin Sorrell's WPP Group, predicts zero ad growth in 2010,  "we media buyers invariably fail to predict 'trend reversals'. The flat advertising demand in 2010 we forecast may well unfold as a recovery," he said.

Despite the low growth predicted, the trends are better than in 2009. And when newspaper display advertising is considered by itself, Mr Smith noted that the scenario was even better.

He warned, however, that structural changes ­ particularly the trend from cost per thousand to cost per action payment models ­ presented serious challenges to the industry. "Do you really want to get into this business?," asked Mr Smith. "You put your entire business at risk ­ you have to continue to place ads until you get results."

So how do you sustain a CPM model in a CPA world? "There will always be a role for newspapers to sell cost per thousand for brand awareness communication," said Mr Smith, who quoted Wired Magazine as suggesting that media can do so by "making ourselves multidimensional¹ and resetting the economics" by adding functions to the advertising.

"You already provide the context of editorial wealth and authority for advertising. Your platforms can make ads look better and work better," he said.

Some of his other insights include:

- Giving premium content away is not a sustainable business model. Without personally  advocating paywall models, Mr Smith pointed out that using them would not only provide subscription revenue but also information about subscribers that is highly valuable to advertisers;

- Price leadership is vital to newspaper companies because dropping the price won't convince agencies to buy newspaper advertisements if it isn't already part of their campaigns.  But innovation in non-price negotiation is crucial ­ over position, colour, and bundling with on-line advertisements, for example.

- Newspaper display advertising remains crucial to brand building campaigns. "No viral marketing would exist without proper brand advertising behind it," he said.

For a list of participants and other information, consult the Advertising Conference Web site.