More and more publishers are looking to a four-letter acronym for relief from missed advertising deadlines: ISDN.
Now readily available and dropping in price, ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) technology allows publishers to receive digital ads or send pages to remote production facilities at speeds of up to 10 megabytes per minute. "You can [use] Federal Express and have it arrive the next day, or you can use ISDN, and it can be there in 20 minutes," said Heidi Bobzin, public relations coordinator for 4-Sight Ltd. of Great Britain.
While establishing an ISDN connection is often as easy as ordering a new phone line from the telephone company, getting the machines at both ends to talk to each other is a little trickier. Communication-protocol standards remain nonexistent in the ISDN arena, observed Bobzin.
Accordingly, ensuring compatibility now falls on the shoulders of software vendors. B-Linked Inc. of New York City provides turnkey solutions and training, including software allowing advertisers to use any communications software, create an electronic EDI "envelope" to help route digital files and transmit a wide range of file types.
Meanwhile, 4-Sight introduced to the United States a file-transfer system it developed in cooperation with the European Associated Newspapers group. Its Artwork Delivery System automatically embeds fonts and other information into digital files and conducts a pre-flight check of such elements as fonts, OPI commands and PostScript data. On the receiving end of the line, ADS conducts similar checks and then generates an immediate confirmation of receipt and acceptance.
The growing use of ISDN to transmit ads digitally raises other questions for publishers. During a NEXPO workshop on quality, Donna Yannessa, quality-assurance manager for Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., argued that digital ads often present problems: oversized files, improperly sized files, files with improperly oriented ads or missing elements like fonts and images, poor-quality images and digital files "scanned once for all kinds of publications."
Working with advertisers to solve these problems "may be as simple as providing requirements, or as complex as sitting down with advertisers and going through their process," she added. PNI distributes NAA's recently-published digital-advertising guide, provides technical support on hardware and software and periodically provides refresher training.
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