Mission: Classified
Several factors are driving managers to replace the classified pagination systems that have been chugging quietly along, in some cases, since the 1970s, and traffic at NEXPO vendors' booths surged in response.
Expenditures for newspaper classified ads reached $3.5 billion for the first quarter of this year, yet poaching by print and electronic competitors grows. The demand to put classifieds onto World Wide Web sites makes storing classified data in relational databases more appealing, and logical rules-based pagination eases multiple use of ads. Then there is the ubiquitous question of what will happen the first time an order-entry clerk schedules an ad for the Year 2000.
Jeff Sie, vice president of Advanced Publishing Technology, Burbank, Calif., has been selling Microsoft Windows systems since 1991 and now finds Windows NT and Structured Query Language servers especially strong draws for his ACT Advertising order-and-pagination system. "We're backed up with installations to November," he reported.
Yet Macintosh operating systems remain popular for classified systems. Managing Editor Inc.'s Page Director Classified Layout System 2.0 adopts a new code base and AppleScript to cope with the Year 2000 challenge and to create a variety of parameters governing where both liner and display ads should appear in a classified section. Once in place, with headers corrected, fillers inserted, indexes generated, color specified and columns vertically justified, the pages flow into Quark.
Atex Media Solutions, Bedford, Mass., offers Classified Pagination, which not only creates rules-based pagination, but also allows users to extract classified display-ad and liner information from an advertising front-end system and store it on the user's work station. This eliminates dependence on the front-end and enables fast page-building.
Under Ad Manager Pro from BaseView, Ann Arbor, Mich., also a Macintosh-based ad-management system, classified and display ads reside in the same database, allowing access for billing, scheduling, contract management, and generating a wide variety of reports.
Foley, Torregiani and Associates Inc.'s ClassPage can take ads from virtually any front-end system, build classified pages in less than five-seconds-per-page on a Pentium, and export the pages to PostScript or non-PostScript output devices. Bill Foley, treasurer of the Londonderry, N.H., firm, says it can build classified sections back-to-front, front-to-back or from both ends toward the middle.
Version 4 of Classified Advertising from Pongrass Publishing Systems of Sydney, Australia, supports Windows 95 with SQL databases and Power Macintoshes as well as Windows 3.1. Software Consulting Services of Nazareth, Pa., uses Pentium Pros or Unix computers as servers for its ClassPag pagination system, which officials say can paginate 10,000 ads on 100 pages in less than 30 seconds.
Classified-ad pagination potential is among the factors that led Mactive AB of Sweden to set up Mactive Inc., which opened for business in Melbourne, Fla., Jan. 1. Mactive's AdBase and AutoClass classified pagination bring European-style integration to advertising sales and production.
AdPlacer from Informatel of Quebec also stresses integration, though on a less complex scale. AdPlacer algorithms calculate the total space taken up by display and classified ads, and suggest the number of pages, the ad-editorial ratio and the average revenue per page.
Perhaps the ultimate in classified-pagination simplicity is a new service from Quantum 2000 of Irving, Texas, which offers business, dummying, pagination and finance software for classified and display ads. Newspapers can collect classified ads and send them via the Internet to Quantum 2000, which will paginate pages and return them to the sender within an hour or two. Officials expect this service to appeal to newspaper publishers who want to try out the Quantum system before they buy it, those who function shorthanded, and anyone who suddenly loses a key employee.
Elise Burroughs, Presstime executive editor. E-mail, burre@naa.org; phone, (703) 902-1678; fax, (703) 902-1690.