For its annual meeting this summer, the California Newspaper Publishers Association put together a panel on digital display advertising and asked me to comment on the future of said technology.
After cogitating for a minute or 60, I decided the future of digital display advertising falls into four categories--moving toward a "standard" portable ad format, moving away from third parties, Internet delivery and new benefits.
Standard PAF. The Newspaper Association of America (publishers of this fine journal) found last year that it was unable to recommend a specific format for the delivery of digital display advertising, because all the solutions were proprietary, and it could not legally endorse one vendor's software over another's.
This necessitated its developing a description of a "portable ad format," which is outlined in its just-released "Portable Advertising Format" booklet--call (800) 651-4622 and ask for Reference Item #10038, or check out the Marketplace section of NAA's home page (http://www.naa.org).
But events move faster than publication sometimes, and a subcommittee of the Committee for Graphic Arts Technologies Standards has recommended that Adobe Systems' Portable Document Format, which is used in Adobe's Acrobat product line, be adopted as one of two standards for the transmission of digital display advertising. (The other is TIFF/IT, a raster-imaged based format favored by magazine publishers). These recommendations will be taken to the International Standards Organization for eventual adoption as a worldwide standard.
Adobe has published the PDF format, and other suppliers are now encouraged to develop application software that not only reads the format but writes it as well, meaning that Adobe will no longer be the sole supplier of PDF software.
This means that PDF will become an international standard for the transmission of digital display advertising and that the newspaper association can recommend that its members, and its members' advertisers, use this format.
Third parties. Currently, third-party digital ad deliverers--such as the Associated Press' AdSEND, Autologic Information International's DigiFlex and AdExpress--provide a great deal of "hand-holding" for advertisers. They check the files to make certain they'll transmit and print, and they provide services to help ensure quality reproduction.
But as time passes, I believe advertisers will not need these services as much, and that the third-party providers' role will diminish.
That's not to say they'll disappear, just that over time fewer and fewer advertisers will require their services, because those advertisers will have cultivated in-house talent to handle the need.
Today the transmission of display advertising to a newspaper can be fraught with problems, ranging from incompatible file formats to missing fonts. As the newspaper industry, and the graphic arts trade in general, adopts standard file-transmission formats (see above), most of these problems will go away.
With easy-to-use transmission products (see below), I think advertisers will decide that it is more efficient to handle their own transmissions.
Internet delivery. One area where third parties will continue to benefit both newspapers and advertisers is in transmission facilitation. Products such as those created by Advertising Communications International Inc. and B-Linked Inc., which assist advertisers in the preparation and transmission of ads, will be useful--especially when you consider that many (if not all) newspapers will have high-bandwidth connectivity to the Internet. This means that it will become redundant for a newspaper to take in digital display advertising in any way other than over the Internet.
Although there are many concerns about what shape the Internet will ultimately take--and even whether it's a good idea to handle commerce over the Internet at all--it seems to me that if a newspaper has T1 connectivity to the 'Net, it would be in both the paper's and the advertiser's best interest to use it.
So, I see a move toward Internet delivery of digital display ads, using third-party products to send and receive the ads.
New benefits. The benefits of these changes should be quite apparent: for advertisers, it will mean the ability to send orders later in the production cycle and to send material--files now--later in the cycle too.
Although many newspapers today have to make their digital-file deadlines earlier than their camera-ready deadlines, as more and more advertisers comply with the evolving standards, digital-file deadlines should move back--possibly as late as an hour before press start for some advertisers. Maybe papers will develop a rate for late delivery.
These changes should make advertisers more interested in using newspapers to deliver their messages, because it will be easier for them to order and send the ads.
And that's the goal, isn't it? More advertising in newspapers?
Cole is a San Francisco-based newspaper consultant and editor of The Cole Papers, a monthly newsletter on technology, journalism and publishing. E-mail, dmc@colegroup.com; phone, (415) 673-2424; fax, (415) 673-2449. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily TechNews or NAA.
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