Better Grades on National Ads, But Room to Grow

by Ted Fournier

Last year was a banner year for national advertising in newspapers, as our industry increased its share of the $58 billion pie. But are we truly positioned for continued growth, especially with the recent decline in overall ad spending?

An annual report card issued by the Newspaper National Network with technical support from NAA’s Color Reproduction Quality Task Force helps answer this question. NNN uses registration, color-matching and mechanical-defect criteria to grade 2,500 national-ad tear sheets; As and Bs are generally considered superior.

In 1999, only nine percent of all tear sheets earned As. Some 37 percent earned Bs, indicating minor problems with one of the three ranking criteria, such as registration being off by a dot. A whopping 52 percent were given Cs for ads considered marginal in all criteria or even a borderline failure in one area. Most C grades would fail internal-quality standards. And 2 percent earned Fs, meaning reproduction was unacceptable.

The good news is that our industry improved significantly in 2000, with C grades dropping 10 percent while As and Bs increased. Top papers continue to stress the need to continuously improve their entire workflow, beginning with constantly communicating with advertisers to better manage expectations. Firmly committed to national advertising, they also keep tight control over their tear sheet procedures, ensuring that only “good copy” tear sheets are submitted in a timely manner.

The bad news is that we still have a long way to go–especially in the eyes of the advertisers frustrated with poor-quality C and F tearsheets, which still accounted for 42 percent of our sample. Only five of the top 10 papers even averaged a B or higher!

In spite of this, national advertising in newspapers has grown dramatically over the past few years due to our superior market reach over other media, which have become more and more segmented.

In particular, na-tional advertisers love that only through newspapers can they reach 57 percent of adults on weekdays and 67 percent on Sundays with a readership that is usually more educated, affluent and motivated to buy.

Thus we must continue to strive as an industry to improve. Organizations such as the NAA Color Reproduction Quality Task Force are available to help refine and standardize our industry.

Above all, newspapers and advertisers alike must diligently adhere to the published Specifications for Newsprint Advertising Production. Newspapers must proactively communicate to advertisers our absolute requirement to have all incoming materials created to meet SNAP requirements. Only through such adherence can we hope to improve quality and minimize variation in a national ad printed under many different conditions across the country.

Our reward, of course, is a greater share of the $58 billion national advertising market. Though compared with the tremendous growth in national newspaper ads in 1999, we have slowed in the first quarter of 2001, the profits from even a small increase in share can greatly help offset the losses from newsprint price increases and reduced classified-ad revenue.

Fournier is a member of NAA’s Color Reproduction Quality Task Force. E-mail, tfour@prodigy.net.

JPEG2K:
Catch a Wavelet

by Christopher J. Feola

Don’t look now, but your images are about to catch a wavelet.

Don’t worry, you won’t need a boardlet. You’ll just need image-editing software designed to handle JPEG2000, the new image standard approved March 9 in Singapore. (Given the track record of the last 10 years in technology, delivering JPEG2000 in the first quarter of 2001 is actually not bad.)

JPEG2000, the successor to the eponymous JPEG image standard, is based on wavelet compression. Designed to deliver high-quality images even under heavy compression, JP2 files use wavelet transforms for compression, rather than JPEG’s Fourier transforms. The new standard also discards the old standard’s 8-by-8 pixel block sampling, which results in the well-known JPEG “artifacting” under compression.

The old JPEG standard uses “lossy” compression based on averaging or discarding Least Significant Bits. Lossy compression is what it says–compressed files suffer some loss of quality. This was less of a problem when the format first became popular as a way to compress files for lower-resolution, online use.

But a real trade-off between image quality and file storage has since emerged, especially in digital cameras. Professional digital cameras can use more than 10 megabytes per image–and that can fill a Compact Flash card pronto. The situation has gotten so out of hand that vendors are adding 1-gigabyte hard drives and recordable CD-ROMs.

JPEG2000 is designed to address these problems, says Eric Edwards of Sony, a spokesman for the JPEG2000 committee. “The most important message on JPEG 2000 is scalability,” he says. “This new standard was developed to operate well in network and mobile environments.”

LuraTech Inc.'s implementation of JPEG 2000 can be seen in this comparison of a 1.2-megabyte TIFF image (at left), and 8-kilobyte versions in JPEG 2000 (center) and standard JPEG (right) formats.

But with images, the proof is in the viewing (see pictures, above). So is this the end for JPEG? Not necessarily, says Edwards. “We expect that JPEG2000 will complement the JPEG standard. JPEG is still very capable of meeting many application requirements.”

Then, of course, there’s the adoption question every new standard faces: Unless Nikon, Canon, Kodak, et al., adopt this thing–and until Adobe Photoshop reads it, and World Wide Web browsers can view it–this will all remain speculation.

Feola is vice president of technology for Belo Inter-active Inc. of Dallas. E-mail, cfeola@belointeractive.com.

TechNews Volume 7, Number 3: May/June 2001

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