Sofitel Paris Forum Rive Gauche Thursday 23 and Friday 24 February 2006

A record 480 participants from 75 countries

List of participants
Programme

How to generate revenue with a classified website

Want to make money from a classified advertising web site? Mr van der Meer has some advice.

"Make sure your website is perfect, it has to match the sites of huge players like eBay!!""

Well, easier said than done. But Mr van der Meer provided practical steps toward perfection, and he has apparently succeeded with his site, part of the Telegraaf group -- they’ve beaten eBay in the highly competitive Dutch market.

One of the keys was to study eBay and the other on-line players before launch -- and to avoid the mistakes they made. So when Speuders launched 18 months ago, its site was easier to use than its competitors, and had additional functions.

Mr Meer said a good product was essential to success. But how to create one? He offered a case study that is a primer on how to succeed online. Here is just a few of his suggestions;

 Invest in highly qualified professionals. "The mentality of your IT team must be to at least match the quality of the technology of eBay, Yahoo, Google or MSN," he says.

 To build critical mass, begin by offering free listings. "This is what a lot of players did in our business; create critical mass and build a position before you start charging."

 Invest time and money in a top-quality platform, and ’jump start’ the site by making deals with several small classified sties to fill your database.

Classified Migration Accelerates

The migration of classified advertising from print to the internet is accelerating, according to preliminary results of the third annual World Association of Newspapers survey on the migration trend.

The survey, to be completed in March, includes data from 22 countries and shows:

 Internet advertising provided 2.5 percent of all newspaper revenue in 2005.

 It grew 32 percent in 2005 compared with eight percent growth a year earlier.

 Internet classifieds provide 7.8 percent of all newspaper classified revenues.

 Print classified revenues fell 4.5 percent in 2005.

"We are seeing fantastic growth in online classifieds, but it is not enough to make up for the money lost from print classifieds," says Mr Chisholm, who advised newspapers to put more into their online strategies, and to do it quickly.

Mr Chisholm, Director of the WAN Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project, asked newspapers to participate in the survey to "benchmark" themselves against newspapers around the world, share advice and strategies and receive the annual classified advertising report from SFN. To participate, contact Mr Chisholm at Jim.Chisholm@futureofthenewspaper.com.

Everything communicates

In a world where "everything communicates," and competitors are proliferating, is traditional newspaper ad sales training meeting the needs of the market?

While training tends to focus on selling skills and on newspaper portfolio knowledge, advertisers and clients are looking for more, according to a World Association of Newspapers survey of advertising directors, agencies and clients.

Advertising directors in the survey said developing sales techniques was a priority of training, while the agencies and clients " want our reps to talk knowledgeably about the marketplace and not just on the bits we sell."

As competition increases and multi-media selling becomes more prevalent, this is sound advice, says Mr Byrne. "If we are facing increasing competition from traditional and digital media and alternative competitors, then we should understand them to a degree that we could sell them ourselves."

Mr Byrne proposed a change of emphasis that would put training in new media and other competitors, fragmentation and measurement at the top of the training priorities, followed by knowledge of the newspaper portfolio and sales skills. "We should focus our training outward," he says.

Managing a Sales Team

Here is a useful definition of a sale’s manager’s first task:

"The creation of a sales system which will successfully function, even in the absence of its creator," says Ms Shevchuk.

"Task one of the sales service manager is to create such a sales system, which support would require no more than 20 percent of his time. Task two is to continuously work on system development, its improvement and adaptation to market changes, " she said.

Ms Shevchuk’s presentation focused on the elements needed to keep sales staff self-sufficient and motivated.

These include analysis of the market, of clients and of sales in the previous sales period; planning based on data about market trends, sales dynamics, competitors, sales targets and more; organisation including the setting of goals and objectives; and creation of an environment in which personnel strive to complete the sales plan.

The last item is all about motivation. Here are several of Ms Shevchuk’s suggestions for motivating staff:

 Establish clear and distinct rules of work and stick to them.

 Stimulate your co-workers to plan ahead and make their own decisions within their competency.

 Provide a vision for the next step in future career growth of your employees.

 If you make a mistake -- admit it.

Traditional Training Isn’t Enough

Traditional training for advertising sales people will only marginally improve their ability to sell newspaper advertising, says Mr Barr.

Training in such skills as opening and closing a sales appointment and overcoming objections have their place, but "there is a much more powerful selling tool that advertising salespeople should be up-skilled in, and that is the knowledge of advertising and advertising techniques," says Mr Barr.

"Clients are not looking to buy advertising space. But they are looking for solutions that will help sustain and grow their business. We say we know this and yet we persist in putting salespeople into the field with the objective of selling space to clients. If an advertising salesperson has the kind of knowledge that the advertiser is looking for, and is able to demonstrate how best to utilize the pages of their paper, then the business will naturally follow."

Using numerous examples to illustrate this sales approach, Mr Barr demonstrated the skills necessary to sell newspaper advertising in today’s market. Two of his many suggestions:

 Train your salespeople to understand the structure and content of effective advertisements.

 Train creative and production staff to produce advertisements that communicate effectively before they entertain. "Remember, what goes into an advertisement is not as important as what the recipient takes out of it."

Taking it to the agencies

Newspapers in France have a problem -- advertising agencies much prefer television and radio as advertising vehicles.

Even worse, they don’t have the tools necessary to gauge press effectiveness.

"When they talk about press at all, they only want to talk about circulation," says Mr Bosio. "And we know full well that, of all the criteria when it comes to assessing the performance of newspapers, the one that is most difficult for us is issue-based sales Concentrating the analyses of the agencies on that is going to bring back the business of the past -- negotiating space price."

It is therefore up to the French newspaper industry to develop the sophisticated tools necessary to measure advertising effectiveness and demonstrate it to the agencies, and this is what Publiprint and Interdeco (a division of Hachette) have done, says Mr Bosio.

They have focused on five criteria to show the unique characteristics of the daily press. They are:

 Modernity. Major dailies in France have renewed their editorial formulae, have introduced a strong supplement strategy and have expanded readership with growth in the free urban press.

 Timing. Newspaper "prime time" is in the morning, with eight million readers before 10 am. "It has enormous clout in the morning, far greater than TV. The advantage is essential for a wide variety of advertisers."

 Quality, not only the value of the editorial content, but the value of the relationship that dailies create with readers.

 Influential readers, with large proportions of chief executives, directors, CEOs and people who are not easily reached or influenced by television.

 Acceptance. Advertising in newspapers is more readily accepted and appreciated by consumers than advertisements on broadcast media. `

The presentation by Mr Bosio and Mr Schmutz included data from their research that demonstrated all of the characteristics.

Start the Presses! Strategies for Revenue Growth

"Millions in revenue lie buried in obsolete rate structures and dysfunctional pricing strategies," says Mr Kubas, who presented five strategies for more sustainable and profitable revenue growth.

They are: restore pricing disciple; apply spending-based discounts; introduce modular units; sell impact, not space; and consider a conversion to compact format.

He says implementation of each of these strategies will increase revenue between 2 percent and 6 percent; implementing all of them would raise revenues 14 to 24 percent.

His presentation focused on how to achieve these goals. Here are two examples:

Newspapers should get control over unwarranted discounts, and establish spending-based discounts that reward customers for all advertising spending. "Create incentives without altering the fundamental pricing structure," he says, providing methods for achieving this.

He also sings the praises of pre-set, modular units, in which the standard unit is the page and portions of a page rather than linear measurements in millimeters or inches. Advertisers could still buy non-standard units, but at a premium. And revenues and profits increase with larger minimum sizes.

"Newspapers still accept almost any ad size," he says. "No other media does -- just try it on radio, TV and magazines."

Webpanels - The two-way loyalty machine

When Bonnier Publications Denmark decided in 2004 that it wanted to increase its focus on testing the impact of advertisements, it did not turn to the traditional call center to carry out the work.

"In order to obtain cost-efficiency, Bonnier Publication decided to shift from a traditional call center testing to web-based testing," said Ms Biune. "In addition, the processes for presenting the results to the advertisers were steamlined. This makes us able to present results within 48 hours, giving the advertisers vital guidance in the development of their communication."

The presentation by Ms Biune and Mr Langgard, whose company developed the web-testing concept and techniocal platform, focused on how to implement such a programme and the results.

"This is Gold Dust"

The newspaper industry is good at giving awards and having black-tie dinners to honor the winners.

But when the Newspaper Society wanted to get young advertising creatives interested in newspapers, it knew a stiff awards ceremony wouldn’t work.

So the Newspaper Society tried something different -- it locked them in a house for the day with the top names in the business to mentor and judge, gave them a brief and set them to work, and then picked the best two teams to receive the "Creative Juice" awards, designed to honor young creatives who do the best newspaper advertisements.

The goal was to get them to understand the value of newspapers and the creative challenges they offer -- and it worked.

"From a group of young people who at the start of the day didn’t really understand the medium -- and we had 40 of them -- at the end of the day they really understood how our medium works and how it is different from other media," says Mr Ray.

Ad Awards in Brazil create prestige

Never underestimate the power of advertising awards to motivate advertisers and agencies to reconsider newspapers, says Mr Leite.

The positive response the Brazilian creative awards have received from the world’s top advertising agencies is evidence of their impact.

Brazil has more than 500 daily newspapers that reach three-quarters of adults daily. It is the core of most media groups in Brazil and the most credible.

At the same time, newspapers have suffered a gradual loss of ad share over the past five years, and do not enjoy the same prestige and value among ad agencies as other media. To help stem the tide, ANJ launched its ad awards in 2001.

"Our intention was to value the creative ads and make them more effective," said Mr Leite. "We believe the newspaper companies are becoming closer to the advertising environment, and producing a kind of glamour for advertisers."

Mr Leite’s presentation focused on the criteria and format of the awards. He presented dozens of examples of creative newspaper advertising. And the impact in the advertising community is highly positive -- Mr Leite presented testimonials from leading advertising agencies about the effectiveness of the awards program.

Aspiring to better newspaper advertising

The goal of the Newspaper Association of America’s ATHENA awards is quite simple: to demonstrate the way newspapers are being used creatively so that more advertisers will aspire to use newspaper advertising.

"There is some really great advertising work being done in newspapers. Recognizing and showing that work is one way to surprise advertisers with the truth about our medium," says Mr Goldstrom. NAA receives about 1,000 entries per competition.

He demonstrated that creativity with numerous examples and described how the NAA’s Award to Honor Excellence in Newspaper Advertising works. Here are a few of his suggestions, drawn from NAA experience, for creating successful advertising awards:

 Use an online entry process, an online judging for the first round. This makes it easier and less expensive for those who enter, and allows judges to cull the finalists from home or office.

 Be proactive. Monitor other competitions and encourage the winners to enter yours.

 Those who enter are often seeking more than recognition -- they may be seeking job advancement. Make sure the top names in the industry are among the judges.

Lesson on Internet Advertising: Move Fast!

The United States is "the epicenter of a seismic shift in the newspaper business from print to online," says Mr Crosbie.

And the lesson from the USA is this: "speed is of the essence in this shift. Newspapers must serve online advertisers as soon as possible, or forever lose the classified advertising business, plus other forms of online advertising, to ’pure play’ internet competitors," says Mr Crosbie.

His presentation included local advertisement spending data collected from 250 markets collected by Borrell Associates, a consultancy which provides strategies to media companies.

"More than 17 billion dollars were spent on advertising online in America and newspapers received nearly 4 billion of that," he says. "Those revenues are growing at nearly geometric rates. Local online advertising is fueling this growth, and newspapers are excellently positioned to capture it."

Newspapers have been dominant in local advertising -- and the online advertising trend in the United States is now moving from national to local.

But newspapers face a major challenge: the revenue generated from a print reader is 20 to 100 times more than the revenue generated by the user of a newspaper’s website. To put it another way, for every print edition reader lost, the newspaper would have to gain between 20 and 100 website users to replace the lost revenues.

"We need to make the revenues we earn from online readers equal or more than what we earned from the people who no longer read us in print," he said.

Data integration for cross-media comparison

"Inter-media comparisons are odious," says Mr Holland, because all media are measured differently.

But that doesn’t stop advertising agencies from making them -- usually to the detriment of newspapers. With no way to justify decisions based on market research, "strong opinions, strong voices usually win the day," he says.

But what if there was a fair way of comparing the value of advertising in different media? That day is coming, says Mr Holland, whose company runs a database that is the central repository for comparative data within the regional newspaper industry in the UK.

His presentation was an overview of developments in data integration among different media.

It is good news for the newspaper industry, he says, because newspaper companies are frequently multi-media companies. Such comparative data could be used to show the reach, frequency and cost benefit of combining different media in an advertising schedule -- and provide the proof that certain combinations of media work best for a particular advertiser in a particular region.

"Reality check" on the state of newspapers

In a keynote address, Mr O’Reilly provided a "reality check" on the state of the newspaper industry to counter the doomsayers and to "dispel the rather tired, conventional wisdom that our industry is a deadwood industry".

Mr O’Reilly demonstrated that print media continues to be successful in both readership and revenue terms and that "reading is still a vital ingredient in the human experience." Moreover, he stressed the need for analysts and others to test the empirical market evidence and not "regurgitate well worn myths".

Despite what the doomsayers predict, newspapers have unique attributes which guarantee their future success. Among other things, Mr O’Reilly cited facts and figures that show:

 Over 1 billion people read a newspaper every day.

 Newspaper circulations worldwide continue to grow - and while this growth is skewed to developing markets, much of the decline in Western markets is reflected in changing consumer habits for evening newspapers.

 Newspaper advertising continues to grow -- and remains more effective than TV.

 Of the established media, newspapers are far better at managing the economic cycle than their competitors.

 In a world of increasing media choice, newspapers represent the only true mass media market channel, being "fragmentation proof."

 Newspapers are competing far more effectively against the rise of digital media than broadcast. "My sense is that traditional newspaper companies first ignored the Internet, then over reacted to it, and then concentrated on the supposed threats it posed (without ever truly embracing it). That is history. That has changed. It is the opportunities - which are numerous - which all newspaper publishers are singularly focused on these days."

 In the last 24 months, more new, innovative newspaper products have been launched than over the prior 30 years.

 Newspaper companies continue to invest heavily in their businesses.

"Media markets are fast-changing and evolving, and newspapers, ?long predicted to be in terminal decline by many advocates of TV and new media, will in fact continue to play a more vital and vibrant role in the media landscape of the future," said Mr O’Reilly.

Making a bigger footprint

The old business model for the newspaper business was, "build it, and they will come." The new model is, "what do you want us to build...and we will build it," says Mr Zidich.

His presentation focused an "audience aggregation" strategy that calls for aggressive expansion of both print and new media products.

"This is about matching audience with products," he says. "It is about delivering the right audience. There is a definite marketplace for selling audience through multiple publications that we had not exploited."

"Today people consume news and information differently than they did in the past," he says. "As a result, newspaper readership has stagnated or declined. But in an audience aggregation model where strategic product development complements the newspaper, the company’s footprint in the market is larger than ever."

What kind of new products are they producing? There are 11 product lines spanning from the daily newspaper through direct mail, magazines, online -- you name it. "The topics are numerous but very much in line with each market’s key interest areas -- health, family, education, things to do, places to go," he says. "The one common threat is news and information that is useful and local. The products range from free to paid, from monthly to quarterly, most in English but some in other languages, with distribution options that include mail, free rack or carrier. All with the intent of getting the right message to the right person."

By covering the market with many different products, the newspaper provides local businesses with a more effective and efficient way to advertise, says Mr Zidich. And local is the key -- while US newspapers in the past relied on large national chains for the bulk of their retail business, they now need more local advertising to replace the loss of a few high-spending advertisers.

Adding new advertisers to your newspapers

UK-based New Revenue Solutions has created a formula to assist newspaper sales teams to add new advertising customers to their publications. And the Bristol Evening Post can attest to their success.

"Our research shows that in most markets, local advertisers waste considerable amounts of advertising money on radio, cinema, mail shots, billboards and directories," said Mr Barker. "Some are already occasional newspaper advertisers flirting with other media, while others may have yet to be convinced of the power of the medium of newspapers."

Mr Barker provided an in-depth look at the workings of the programme, called "Ad!Impact". For the Bristol Evening Post, the programme generated 66 long-term contracts and 400,000 pounds in new revenue.

Briefly, Ad!Impact involves an intensive 12-week process which begins with compiling a database of contacts, from which invitations are sent to qualified businesses.

Business decision-makers are invited to presentations which educate them about the benefits of local newspaper advertising and details the benefits of building awareness among newspaper readers. But the ultimate goal is to convince them to sign up for year-long ad packages.

"Our experience in the newspaper industry is that the programme has enabled sales teams to ’open their eyes’ to new long-term revenue opportunities from local businesses, rather than just selling to the same old client base over and over each week," says Mr Barker.

New advertising products in existing publications

Television takes the bulk of advertising in Russia -- 46 percent of the market to 28 percent for newspapers in second place.

Even worse, newspaper share has been declining.

How Komsomolskaya Pravda and its sister publications created a common advertising product to fight the trend was the subject of Mr Strakhov’s presentation.

The product they chose is a TV guide called Teleprogramma, created in 2001 as a stand-alone magazine with a circulation of 38,000 copies.

Teleprogramma today is still a stand-alone title -- but it is also a supplement, inserted in KP’s weekly and daily editions and into Express Gazeta. The combined circulation is 1.25 million and covers all kind of readers from upscale business people to women to working class.

"We needed to prepare a new offer for the Moscow market to attract additional budgets and attract new clients," said Mr Strakhov. "The new proposal had to have strong competitive advantages in circulation and readership."

Mr Strakhov’s presentation was a case study of the package’s development, from initial setbacks to ultimate success.

Strategies for Bolstering Online Newspaper Revenue

The good news is, newspapers in the United States are benefiting from the rapid growth of online advertising revenue,. The bad news is, those revenues don’t come close to what they make in print.

Although online revenues are growing between 30 and 50 percent per year, online advertising produces far less revenue than print advertising -- frequently only 10 percent of what newspaper advertising produces.

How to accelerate the growth and parity of online advertising was the subject of Ms Stone’s presentation, which included five strategies for bolstering online newspaper revenue and examples of how newspapers are applying them.

Here are two of those strategies:

 Change the culture of the sales department. Sales staff should be trained to understand that they’re no longer working for "just" a newspaper organization and that all the company’s media brands, together, are a powerful advertising sales proposition.

 Improve the quality of websites to drive more traffic. Aim to be the number one news website in your market, but also, "build editorial content of interest to the audience, including photo galleries, breaking news, community-generated content," says Ms Stone. "These popular products produce valuable advertising inventory."

Ms Stone has recently joined the WAN "Shaping the Future of the Newspaper" project, which identifies, analyses and publicizes all important breakthroughs and opportunities that can benefit newspapers all over the world. More on the SFN project at www.futureofthenewspaper.com.