Albany Wires Local Advertisers
When it comes to competition, Dave White has a rule: Get ahead of it. Which is why he wound up plugging some high-voltage partners into The Albany (N.Y.) Times Union's Web site.
First came the Realtors--White believes the Times Union was the first in the country to put an entire Multiple Listing Service database on a newspaper Web site.
"Realtors have a database of information about people who own homes and have them for sale," says White. "Our deal with them is they give us information" for database marketing; in return, White says, the Realtors are "not presently" being charged for Web-site inclusion.
On the automotive side, there was none of the infrastructure the MLS partnership provided. "They didn't have a database, so we created one for them," White says.
Associated Information Systems International Inc. of Auburn, Calif., worked with the Times Union earlier this year to develop a product called AUTObase, which allows advertisers to electronically send classified ads to the newspaper, which reprocesses the data for use not only in Web, but also print and voice formats.
The Times Union signed up 13 dealers over a two-week period in August and received 8,363 requests for information through the newspaper's Web site, according to Morgan Britt, marketing manager for AISI.
It wasn't all smooth sailing. Database maintenance, for example, immediately became an issue.
"When Realtors have sold a house," White says, "they have to take the listing off the database. But with automotive, there's no way they can be expected to do that.
"So our IS folks, with three of the dealers looking over our shoulders, developed a software piece that does inventory management, hard-wired to us, that keeps the inventory of cars out on the Web current at all times."
After that, White says, "the whole process evolved. We'd given them digital cameras to take electronic pictures for the Web site, and we started thinking, 'If we can do this for the Web, why can't we do it on ROP ads?'
"The answer is, we can."
So now the paper's constructed templates for car-dealership ads. The dealers themselves will take pictures of the cars and construct the ads. The process should start "in a matter of weeks," White says.
And there's more to come. From the templates that were designed for car dealers sprang the question, "Why not do this as an ad-entry screen?" says White. So that's the next project for the local IS wizards.
"The Web is full of very rich stuff," White says, "so we reversed the thought process. Instead of thinking, 'How can I get it from class page to Web,' we think of putting a set of very rich data on the file server, then draw from that for the paper, Web, cable, and on and on. It's much more efficient."
-- John Bryan and Andrew Bowser
John Bryan is a member of the Technology Resource Group at the Los Angeles Times. E-mail, john.bryan@latimes.com; phone, (213) 237-4711.
Andrew Bowser is a writer on technology and industrial applications. E-mail, andyb@comm.net; phone, (504) 897-4026.