- Ship your classified ads to an outside service bureau for posting on the Web.
- Add a system to your classified front-end that will extract ads and prep them for the Web.
- Trade in your elderly classified computers for a brand-new system that can ship ads to either your print product or your Web site.
- Papers ship their classified ads to AdOne via the Internet once a day (and some of them only once a week).
- AdOne parses the ads and inserts them into its database.
- Now an ad, when called up by the reader, looks as if it appears in two places--on the newspaper's Web site and as part of the massive AdOne database, which hosts nearly 500 newspapers with a total circulation of about 12 million.
Classifieds at the Crossroads
The World Wide Web and the Year 2000 Problem are forcing newspapers to upgrade their classified systems
by John Bryan
Perhaps the thought has been sneaking up on you gradually: Your classified system, a key source of profit for virtually any newspaper, is a little long in the tooth.
Oh, it still works all right, even if it's a little slow, even if you've run out of ports and can't connect any more ad representatives.
But can it post classified ads to your newspaper's World Wide Web site? You've come to believe that you have to be on the Web--as a service to your readers and your advertisers, and as a defense against the hordes of non-newspaper competitors who are rushing to steal this exploding new market.
Then there's that problem the geeks call "Y2K:" Year 2000, the last gasp of the 20th century that's scheduled to give computer systems a worldwide case of dyspepsia as the calendars turn over. Will your class system survive?
Yep, it's time for action--but what kind of action? The options, in order of increasing time, effort and expense, are:
What should you do? We can't give you a definitive answer, of course--that's the province of all those consultants you see wandering the land with dollar signs in their eyes. But we will caution that if your legacy system has a Y2K problem, neither of the first two options will solve it. We can also advise that before you make a decision, you must learn about a little known but crucial concept called "parsing."
The Power of the Parsed Strings
There seems to be agreement on at least two aspects of Web-site construction: You need a separate database to make it work right, and you need some way of parsing an ad to make it searchable.
Parsing is a computer process in which a program reads a text file and converts it to a far more efficient SQL-database form.
For example, the ad in the classified database might read:
"Ad number 537920
Classification 230
Logo 312
2rms rv vw
$1500, 555-5094."
The ad (minus the non-printing ad number, classification and logo information) can be converted to HTML coding and put up on the Web in that form, but a search engine would have to read it in one gulp, which slows down searching enormously.
But look at what parsing can do--it can examine the same ad, recognize word patterns and pigeonhole them into blanks in a database record:
"Ad: 537920
Classification: 230
Logo: 312
Rooms: 2
Rent:
$1,500
Phone number: 555-5094."
Now each of these blanks can be quickly searched from the Web site, using a form that the customer could fill out in his or her Web browser.
The record is SQL-compliant, so the database can be linked with others nationwide. People moving from Ann Arbor can find apartments in Dayton.
And when the ad is called from the database, parsing can also expand the "classified-ese" abbreviations:
"Two room apartment, with a river view. Renting for $1,500 a month. Please call 555-5094."
And that phone number? It can be sent to a database that will connect to the phone system for automatic dialing and a callback to the customer to get the ad extended.
"Here--You Do It"
As a service bureau, AdOne Classified Network of New York will parse your classified data. It will also go a step further by placing your ads on its massive Web-classifieds network, where the whole country can get to it.
The AdOne scheme works this way:
"Every ad is totally branded," says Brendan Burns, executive vice president and founder of AdOne, "but because they're in the AdOne classified network, we're helping the newspapers distribute that ad to many more customers.
"It allows you to leverage your investment in your legacy system and let somebody else worry about technical advancements."
Burns says he's testing the same concept for display ads--his network will parse the ads and put them on the database. When the customer searches and gets a "hit," he'll get an image of the display ad on his computer screen.
But why not just buy an up-to-date system and keep it all in house?
Burns argues that his shop provides expertise and flexibility you couldn't get with a new system. "We've been successful because we've worked with a huge number of newspapers, and we've encountered all their problems," he says.
"Online classified is only about two years old, and it's evolving so fast, it's really difficult to predict what will happen. Does it make a lot of sense to buy a whole new system when it's so early?"
Add-On Adventures
Mark Stange, vice president of advertising for the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, is unapologetic about his preference for adding on to classified systems to leverage existing equipment.
At Dayton, ads "trickle" out of the paper's Digital Technology International classified system into an Edgil Associates Inc. WebCentral system. As the ads are taken, reps can offer "instant publishing" on the Web site for an additional premium. The ad is stored in the DTI system, and a copy immediately moves to the Edgil database.
"A lot of vendors haven't really thought through the parsing," says Stange. "They use hype from the Web to sell their systems, but they're only doing HTML coding.
"My question is: What's your destination? Where do you want to be?"
If you want to be SQL-compliant, says Stange, "you're going to want a separate, searchable database."
He points to automatic call distribution as another example of how add-ons can complement existing hardware. "Callbacks are a huge revenue generator for a classified system," Stange says. "Your rep can get a list on the screen of expiring ads, the system can send the digits back to the ACD for a quick redial, and those customers can be prompted to rerun their ad. That's a big deal."
At The Herald-Sun in Durham, N.C., "We use Macs to design our Web sites, but we use PCs to manage data," says New-Media Director Bryan Burnett. "We have an NT server on the back-end and Windows 95 on the front-end.
"We can easily extract the classification, but in terms of parsing the ad, it's very difficult. We basically look at the dump file each evening. We can grab the text of the ads and combine that information with the classification and ad number. The only piece of information we pull out is whether it has a logo."
If there is a logo, Burnett consults a small database and substitutes a text string (such as the company's name), since classified logos seldom look good on the Web.
The New and the Flexible
"Our old system needed replacing because it was going to break," says Larry Kline, advertising director for the Los Angeles Times, of the paper's 1980s-vintage, home-built classified system. "It had dumb terminals, no spare parts, all those issues creeping up, and it had a Year 2000 problem as well."
That was seven or eight years ago, and the Times started talking to the big mainframe-computer systems houses like Atex Corp. and Systems Integrators Inc. When the smoke cleared, however, the Times had chosen a 300-seat, OS/2 version of CText Inc.'s AdVision system. The Times has just moved two of its biggest enchiladas--employment and auto--off the home-brew system and onto CText. Conversion was scheduled to be complete in September.
"Right now, it's a new toy, and I think they have to find out where all the bells and whistles are and get a comfort level," says Kline. "I think it's probably affected us from a speed standpoint, just getting used to it. But I think that'll quickly correct itself."
"We went in category by category," adds Steve Anderson, classified director of the Times' Orange County edition, "so that you had people using both systems for a while. If you were a rep who sold automotive and employment, you did one on this machine and turned around and did the other over there.
"So we trained them just to get an ad in the paper and service the customer, and what I'm now hearing outside my office is just delightful: 'Hey, look at what this thing can do! Did you know you can make it do this?' So they're feeding off each other now, and that's just a marvelous thing," Anderson says. "It's so new that we're seeing improvement on a weekly basis in how they're using it."
But the joy of the toy is not confined to the ad representatives. The managers are getting marketing flexibility they never had under the old system.
"The overriding issue in a new system for me is the flexibility it gives our salesforce from a speed and service standpoint that we didn't have before," says Kline.
At the Times, the focus right now is on the Web, to no one's surprise, but the kind of systems available today also let you turn on a dime to provide new products as market forces dictate.
Part of that is a result of the move to standard, off-the-shelf systems that can link relatively easily to specific subsystems. But part of it is just the result of generations of improvement.
Kirk Norlin of System Integrators gives some good examples of the latter kind of flexibility.
"Using one of today's systems, a car dealer can go on the Internet, type in his ad and add a code for a logo," Norlin says. "Ideally, the system should be able to justify and cost it interactively.
"With faxing, they can do the same thing," he adds. "Once the ad's faxed in, it's already digitized and coded for header information. The system picks that up and does the optical character recognition. Then it's thrown up on a screen next to the fax, so it can be checked for accuracy."
Norlin says his company is also installing voice-response systems. "You pick up the phone, and through an auto-attendant, actually place the ad. It'll read the ad back to you, cost it and do some additional upselling. By automating, today's systems can increase the number of ads per hour that can be taken by the ad reps."
Another thing to look for in new systems is a tight interface between the classified front-end and the pagination back-end, says Paul Mrozinski, director of sales and support services for CText.
"My experience has been that it's best to stick to one vendor because those are tightly integrated pieces. If you use different vendors, you'll be opening yourself up to a lot of problems in making everything work the way you want."
The best classified-pagination systems use "rules" to determine how liner ads flow into the page: If it's this section, fill it front to back; if that section, fill it back to front; this ad always runs in this position on these days, and so on.
A measure of the flexibility of the system lies in how many levels of rules your system gives you.
For example, Mrozinski claims his system "allows you to set up multiple publications, zones and editions, and every one of those can have its own pagination rules associated with it."
Alan Miller, vice president of marketing at Atex Media Solutions, argues for tight integration of information-processing "pieces" around a central database, and that in turn requires operations managers to think in new ways about what their systems do.
"One of the things that struck me about NAA's Connections conference in San Francisco is the way the vast majority of people spoke of their Web sites as separate, ancillary arms of their operations," Miller says. "I was disappointed by that--it's extremely short-sighted.
"We've been using the word 'repurpose' for several years, and that to me suggests we think the data has one purpose to begin with, predestined, and then as an afterthought it gets shoved over to something else.
"We need to get away from that, to a place where we're getting information from a variety of sources and delivering it in different forms to a variety of destinations," Miller says.
Mac vs. PC: Still an Issue?
One attribute that generally can't be added-on is ease-of-use, something every system manufacturer aspires to, and some (these days) attain. It's just as important at the lower end of the scale as it is for big-city metro papers like the L.A. Times, because ease-of-use means productivity, and productivity means profits--no matter what your size.
Baseview Products, which caters mainly to papers of under 20,000 circulation, gets what they think is a leg up on the competition by using Macintoshes for their workstations.
"We've always been Mac users because of the ease of installation and training," says Jim Meyer, the firm's vice president for development. "We typically can convert a four- or five-station classified system in a week or less. Our text editing is 'WYSIWYG,' so there's no markup language."
But when it comes to classified platforms, it's becoming a Windows world, even though the newsrooms are a mixture of Macs and PCs.
"It's still an issue," says CText's Mrozinski. "People have been using Macs for some time, and they don't want to be pushed onto a PC platform.
"I think the only issue is being able to run on both platforms," he adds. "With the recent support of Apple by Microsoft, you might see those lines blur. That would be a good thing because people would have a choice in which way they want to go."
Be that as it may, CText has held up plans for a Mac client because the customer who'd expressed interest "changed their stance," as Mrozinski put it.
Linda Gagnon, vice president of sales and marketing for Edgil Associates Inc., is less constrained:
"It depends on your systems-people's knowledge, long-term support and your long-range plans, but I can't imagine why somebody would invest in a Mac system. We're currently OS/2 and UNIX, but we're porting to Windows NT now, solely because of market perception and market acceptance," Gagnon says.
Whatever platform you choose, and whatever path you take--service bureau, add-ons or buying new--it's clear you can now make some bucks by shooting your ads onto the Web. Think about it: That's something the naysayers doubted even last year.
"We can make money on this kind of stuff," Stange says enthusiastically. "We tend to take for granted how good a job we can do for the customer. When you create value, you can get money for that value."
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.
Sources
Steve Anderson, Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626. E-mail, steve.anderson@latimes.com; phone, (714) 966-5705, fax, (714) 966-4520.
Bryan Burnett, The Herald-Sun, 2828 Pickett Road, Durham, N.C. 27705. Email, bcb@herald-sun.com; phone, (919) 419-6529; fax, (919) 419-6837.
Brendan Burns, AdOne Classified Network, 361 Broadway, Suite 100, New York, N.Y. 10013. Email, brendan@adone.com; phone, (212) 965-2100; fax, (212) 334-3307.
Linda Gagnon, Edgil Associates Inc., 15 Tyngsboro Road, North Chelmsford, Mass. 01863. Email, lindag@edgil.ccmail.compuserve.com; phone, (508) 251-9932, ext. 244; fax, (508) 251-9970.
Larry Kline, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, Calif. 90053. Email, larry.kline@latimes.com; phone, (213) 237-6101; fax, (213) 237-5057.
Jim Meyer, Baseview Products Inc., 333 Jackson Plaza, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48103. Email, marketing@baseview.com; phone, (313) 662-5800; fax, (313) 662-5204.
Allen Miller, Atex Media Solutions, 15 Crosby Drive, Bedford, Mass. 01730. Email, amiller@atex.com; phone, (617) 275-2323; fax, (617) 276-1256.
Paul Mrozinski, CText Inc. 1428 Ellsworth Rd., Ann Arbor, Mich. 48108. Email, pmrozinski@ctext.com; phone, (313) 677-7601; fax, (313) 677-4747.
Kirk Norlin, System Integrators Inc., 1300 National Drive, Sacramento, Calif. 95834. Email, norlin@sii.com; phone, (916) 929-9481, ext. 3436; fax, (916) 928-0319.
Lyn Chitow Oakes, Electric Classifieds Inc., 651 Brannan St., San Francisco, Calif. 94107. Email, lyn@eci.net; phone, (415) 659-6334.
Mark Stange, Dayton Daily News, 45 S. Ludlow St., Dayton, Ohio 45458. Email, mark_stange@coxohio.com; phone, (937) 225-2082; fax, (937) 225-2088.
Dave White, The Times Union, 645 Albany-Shaker Rd., Albany, N.Y. 12212. Email, dwhite@hearst.com; phone, (518) 454-5568; fax, (518) 489-5877.