Driven by advertisers who find it too expensive to deliver printed material to a mass market and by the competitive pressures of direct mail, newspapers seek out innovative ways to deliver finer and finer zoning levels. Sub-ZIP code and carrier-route capabilities are now common, and some papers are even experimenting with address-specific delivery for individual inserts.
Leading the pack are newspapers like The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, where managing inserts is both high tech and profitable.
Advertising salespeople enter insert orders into their PCs specifying the area for delivery. The software takes all insert orders for a given publication and feeds it to computer-controlled inserting machines, which automatically produce the various packets of inserts.
"On Sunday, we may have 35 inserts and we may have 300 combinations because we offer the advertiser any combination of ZIP codes he wants," says Jimmy Hamilton, The Commercial Appeal's director of operations. "There's no way to keep up with it manually."
Next step for Memphis: a laptop system for salespeople to offer advertisers the insert coverage they need on the spot, whether it's distribution within a two-mile radius or even an irregular shape along specified street boundaries.
"We'll be able to highlight that on an electronic map--which will tell them how many households are in that area, which ZIP codes they are, how many subscribers we have, how many nonsubscribers--and do the order entry for our mailroom system right there," says Hamilton. The software should be up and running by the end of 1996.
The Star Tribune in Minneapolis is currently installing 18 new computer-controlled inserters. The Star Tribune already offers zoning at the route level, "but these machines will increase the accuracy of what we're doing," says Circulation Director Lisa Anderson.
Lack of technology is not stopping some newspapers from offering sub-ZIP code distribution. What The Hartford Courant's Packaging and Transportation Director Julius Neto calls "clip board vs. chip board" zoning is still getting the job done, although the challenge is growing every day.
"We're market driven," says Neto. "If advertisers want to put preprints in a specific area, or just on Sunday, we do accommodate them." This means the Courant will deliver an insert to its smallest rural route--just 16 papers.
The News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., has been offering sub-ZIP code delivery since the mid-80s through a creative delivery system.
Trailers converted to mobile distribution centers guarantee that all insert combinations make it to the right carriers after the papers leave the loading dock. The trailers compartmentalize every carrier's route. Carriers have keys to only their compartments, eliminating mixups. In this way, the News & Record is able to satisfy the needs of advertisers such as the Bi-Lo grocery chain, which knows its customers so well it can create inserts based on cookie preferences for different geographic areas.
The News & Record is also testing its system by delivering Investor's Business Weekly to 200 specific addresses from its database of 100,000 daily subscribers.
"The issue of sub-ZIP sorting is gigantic," says production director David Reno. "We need to be competitive, and if retailers want to market to just their customers, we have to offer it."
Carol Memmott is a free-lance writer living in Chantilly, Va. Phone is (703) 802-6558.
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