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Newspapers around the globe are undertaking innovations to their advertising practices in many ways, both big and small, and the best examples were on display this week at the World Newspaper Advertising Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

As advertising and sales revenues are hit both by recession and increasing competition, newspaper companies are rapidly developing a wide array of new revenue possibilities. The World Newspaper Advertising Conference, which closed on Friday, examined many of the new trends and some unusual projects that show just how flexible newspapers can be.

Two major themes emerged from the conference, organised by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA): better audience and advertising effectiveness research is essential, and the traditional business model for newspapers gaining revenue from advertising and sales can be enhanced in a modern media company. The speakers at the Conference provided with their insight over the same.

In Portugal, where the property market has collapsed, developers have no money for advertising. So, Impresa Classificados returned to a barter economy exchanging a 300,000 Euro advertising campaign for a three-room apartment, which is promptly offered in a lottery. People registered through a special number and paid 72 cents per call raising 300,000 Euros in net revenue for the newspaper company. "So, in the end, we managed an income that corresponds to the real value of the campaign," said Geert Van Hassal, Managing Director of Impresa Classificados.

For Czech Republic, the chain of hyper-local Nase Adresa weeklies and websites are supported, in part, by a chain of "news cafes" that serve as the offices of its editors. Those cafés also provide 18 percent of total revenue. "It's not because we like coffee so much that we created this chain of cafes. It's because we saw a potential revenue stream," said Bozena Rezabova, Marketing Director for PPF, the parent company of Nase Adresa.

The accepted on-line advertising metric of click-throughs is "fatally flawed" and should be replaced with measures that better reflect brand recognition and return on investment, said Matthew Dodd, Vice President for Research and Analytics for Nielsen Online's EMEA. "There is zero correlation between click-through and ROI. The click through measure is anachronistic. So why do we continue to use it? Because we're lazy; because brand owners are lazy. We're working to move brand owners away from that measure."

Discussions about how they interact with online advertising played a large role in the conference, with several presentations focused on new, more effective ways to measure media reach and advertising effectiveness. One of them, the Touchpoints survey in the United Kingdom, combines information about consumer behaviour with usage data from both online and offline media. The result is a detailed picture that allows accurate targeting of people during the day and an understanding of how they use media at any time "what they're doing, who they're with, how much time they spend in single and multiple activities the whole depth and breadth of real life," said Belinda Beeftink, Associate Director for Media Research at the Institute of Practioners in Advertising in London.

Newspapers are learning to engage with social networks and even creating their own to take advantage of the new web ecosystem. They're also finding alternatives to Google for 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 Moritz Wuttke, Founder of NextMedia Initiatives and former CEO of Publicitas in Asia and China. He provided conference participants with advice on how to develop sales channels, pricing methodologies, research and development, contextual and local advertising, and sticky content.