That’s one of the major themes that emerged from the 18th World Newspaper Advertising Conference, held in Budapest late last week. "The book of marketing has been rewritten," said Marcus Wilding, Vice President of Carat Global Management, a keynote speaker at the conference.

The sheer number of media choices and formats is changing the way both editorial content and advertising are consumed. "It’s all about consumer decisions," said Mr Wilding. "What we’re doing is, we’re moving away from, ’here is a space, we want to buy it,’ to ’here is a story, what can we do together to amplify it.’"

That new forms and new techniques are developing was evident in the cases presented at the conference, organised by the Paris-based World Association of Newspapers. Summaries of all the presentations, and quotes from the speakers, can be found here.

It was also clear from the vast array of strategies on display that newspaper companies have become truly multi-media businesses that are able to resist the fragmentation that is transforming both the media and the advertising industries.

From search to events marketing, to new audience measurement techniques, to the day-to-day issues such as training advertising staff for multi-media sales, newspapers have responded to the changing marketplace in many innovative ways.

Take, for example, the movement toward replacing newspaper circulation with an integrated print/online audience measurement to better reflect the reach of newspapers, no matter what the platform.

"Despite newspapers delivering content on many platforms, we’re still being measured in the same old way, by only one of our methods of distribution, and it is misleading," said Andre McGarrigle, Director of Research and Customer Insight for the Guardian, which has developed "Total Audience UK" to measure print and online reach.

Chris Boyd, President of the International Audit Bureau of Circulation, described the work of the Media Measurement Integration Task Force, a WAN initiative that brings together media organisations in a global coalition to encourage integrated audience metrics. And Tamas Perjes, Deputy Media Research Director for IPSOS in Hungary, talked about taking it a step further - measuring the impact of "word of mouth" and engagement to reflect the influence newspaper readers have with their contemporaries.

"There are enough opportunities to let our business grow as long as we can report our audience across channels, as long as we can show the audience profile, and we can deliver effectiveness. So it all starts with aggregated audience measurement," said Erik Grimm, Research Director of Cebuco, the marketing arm of the Dutch Newspaper Association.

More on the Media Measurement Integration Task Force can be found at www.wan-press.org/MMITF/home.php.

Newspapers are even battling the internet giants on their own turf.

"There are two reasons why Google has been a big success. They’re good at what they do. And the second reason is, the rest of the world doesn’t know what they’re doing," said Mikal Rohde, Vice President of Schibsted in Norway. "We have to understand the new business models behind the technology and how we can integrate them into our own businesses."

Schibsted, which has invested in its own search engine called Sesam, is integrating the technology into all its platforms, allowing for both content and advertising "contextualisation" - providing materials to consumers based on their media habits and interests.

The technological innovations aren’t limited to the internet - they’re also occurring in print.

Christian Gaidies, the Press Room Manager at Axel Springer in Germany, and Sabine Sirach, the product marketing director for newspaper systems at MAN Roland, described the Value-Added Printing Project to increase newspaper revenues, circulations and reader satisfaction. By replacing coldset newsprint with higher quality printing, newspapers can produce a 20 to 40 percent premium on advertising rates.

The conference was also influenced by someone who did not attend: Scott Berg, the World Media Director of Hewlett Packard, who was cited by two speakers for saying, "The thing I hate most is for somebody to come sell me a page. I don’t care about ad pages, I care about great ideas and surrounding the consumer with all the media vehicles that newspapers have access to. Newspapers need to start thinking of themselves as content providers."

Timothy Balding, the CEO of WAN, said: "Well, if Scott Berg were here, I’m sure he would realise that newspapers are now doing just that. He would hear great examples of how newspapers are developing their multi-channel businesses with their print publications at the core."

The Paris-based WAN, the global organisation for the newspaper industry, defends and promotes press freedom and the professional and business interests of newspapers world-wide. Representing 18,000 newspapers, its membership includes 77 national newspaper associations, newspaper companies and individual newspaper executives in 102 countries, 12 news agencies and 11 regional and world-wide press groups.

Inquiries to: Larry Kilman, Director of Communications, WAN, 7 rue Geoffroy St Hilaire, 75005 Paris France. Tel: +33 1 47 42 85 00. Fax: +33 1 47 42 49 48. Mobile: +33 6 10 28 97 36. E-mail: lkilman@wan.asso.fr.