Margins, milennials and the transition from print were recurring themes as INMA's World Congress sessions got underway in London today with an aperitif of 'brainsnacks'.

There's a connection here, with the improved margins digital products deliver over print... if you can maintain engagement.

Advance Central Services president Pam Siddall told how the group had taken a radical approach, opting to "disrupt ourselves".

The decision was to grow digital faster than print was declining, with new audiences, products and revenue. One fundamental was to split the business into two, with Advance Local sites making individual, market-driven decisions - including how and when to reduce print frequency - while ACS focused on execution with a central approach.

In five years, Advance has grown to the US's eighth largest news organization, growing traffic in all 50 states and is now number one in some in which it didn't have a print product.

"It's worked out quite well for us," she says with modest understatement. "It's all about the people in the leadership; we changed so much, so fast and it all came down to the people."

With margins partly in mind, Brazil's Grupo RBS was using a new Zero Hora tablet app to migrate print readers to digital. Marcelo Leite says the 209,000 print and digital circulation is "as much as we're likely to get", so ways were being sought to maximize it.

The ZH Tablet - including a newspaper replica and exclusive editions delivering higher margins - was the result of a partnership with Samsung and included a discount club membership, found to drive five-times higher retention.

"Margin is more important than revenue," says Leite.

At Canada's Toronto Star, another app was reaping results as part of cultural changes which included the recruitment of 70 new people in the newsroom, including front-end developers, collaborative and design staff. "Before that, nothing much had changed and (former reporter) Ernest Hemingway would have fitted right in," digital chief operating officer Chris Goodridge commented.

He says the most profound change is the look and feel of the newsroom, with the proportion of milennials increasing from 17 to 37 per cent, with the support of journalists.

The free app has now been downloaded 240,000 times, and has users - average age 48 - spending 25 minutes a day with it. Earlier he had cited eight minutes as a previous typical engagement period with a tablet product, compared to 37 with a print edition.

The value of creating engagement - and knowing that you do - was emphasized by Laura Inman Nolan of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Data has shaped our business, she says of the Cox Media property.

Weekly engagement snapshots make it possible to have "compelling conversations" about content armed by the knowledge that thousands of subscribers might be at risk of leaving. Among tools are a 'Power of five' programme to encourage subscribers to introduce the paper to friends, and custom code which personalizes the treatment of subscribers who respond to sales emails.

Pricing is a sensitive issue with some criticism that users were being punished for loyalty, but Nolan says "one price no longer fits all".

Someone else emphasizing the value of data was Luis Garcia of Argentina's Grupo Clarin, where audience knowledge had driven personalization, and a cable TV unit was now the group's largest business.

Fairfax commercial director Gareth Codd told how New Zealand publishers were coping with competition from Facebook and Google with the formation of a joint venture advertising exchange to sell unsold inventory.

KPEX - for Kiwi Premier Exchange, a partnership between print publishers Fairfax and NZME., Mediaworks and TV group TVNZ - is already on a par with Google with 70 per cent of audience, "has smashed every KPI in the business case" and is already one of the largest exchange cooperatives in the world.

Now it is looking at DSP and on demand video, and "a time when 60-70 per cent of inventory will be sold through exchanges.

Asked how it was possible to get four rival chief executives to sit down together to create the exchange, Codd cited the structures and commercial incentive; no mention of the fact that Fairfax and APN-owned NZME. are currently negotiating a merger.

Colourful stories were at the heart of Ekstra Bladet's engagement success. Creative chief of the Danish group Morten Blichmann told how the capacity to serve advertisers with native advertising and branded video had been boosted by the recruitment of a new team. And he had the results to prove it, screening a well-received 'love at first sight' video for Dating.dk plus more on the same theme... some more blatently commercial than others.

Some were commissioned by advertisers and others pitched to them, he told Terri-Karelle Reid of the Jamaica Gleaner.

And with Generation Z now on the horizon, there was also a lot about milennials, with moderator Mukund Mohan of Microsoft Ventures bringing two young delegates from the floor to talk about their video use, which could amount to ten to 20 minutes an hour: "You mean in work or outside it," Agata Mos of the London Evening Standard asked.

Earlier Mittmedia editorial operations director Anna Karin Lith had told how the Swedish publisher had brought 16 interns in to study the company and share their views on content and advertisements. "We found they had no patience with technology that didn't work and saw content only as valuable or useless.

"They wanted what we didn't have, with video the number one answer," she says. "And they love natives and can't understand why we're not doing it."

As a result, the group has recruited more young people to work with sales and advertiser workshops, and "focus on new money," she says.

At an editorial level, South Africa's Cape Argus had gone further, giving students editorial control of sections and coverage after a Tweeted challenge. "We learned that newspapers can apparently be edited democratically," editor Gasant Abarder reported. Encouraged by the success, they invited a homeless man to write the front-page lead, and have other plans to use the concept to "revitalize print".

And in India, Jagran Prakashan had gained brand credibility and a 35 per cent profit margin as a result of its promotion of a national intelligence test for schoolchildren; participation had grown from 50,000 to 125,000 in three years, editor and chief operating officer Alok Sanwal says.

The conference gets underway in earnest tomorrow with the first of two days of plenary sessions, and leads to the climax social event, the presentation awards dinner at the Victoria and Albert Museum on Tuesday night.

Pictured (from top): Agata Mos, Alok Sanwal, Laura Inman Nolan, Gasant Abarder and Gareth Codd

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