Pre-Press Award: Easy Ad Tracking
by Heidi Ernst
Think The New York Times, and you probably think volume. With a circulation of 1.07 million, it has the third-largest newspaper audience in the country. And the volume of display ads the Times receives every month is rather massive in its own right: 15,000.
Under
a 1995 re-engineering effort, the Times combined half a dozen departments to
form one, called Customer Order Fulfillment, to track all those ads. Even though
COF eliminated duplicate efforts in processing customer requests, its
intentional lack of management hierarchy still meant that 60 service
representatives had no way to locate an ad for a customer until it was being
processed, which created trafficking problems. "Conceptually it was great,
but we needed a better communications tool," says Michael L. Rosen, group
director of operations at the Times. "We wanted to make customers feel they
were getting value for their money. In effect, the original goal of this
re-engineered department was 'one call does it all.' "
Enter
MATT, the Material Tracking and Trafficking system developed in-house at the
Times. It involved writing an application in Lotus Notes, a groupware product
that many companies use for e-mail and information sharing, and hooking it to
Admarc, a newspaper mainframe that handles ad billing and order entry among
other things. "With Lotus Notes, you can develop sophisticated applications
that have communication built into them through e-mail," says Ira
Asinofsky, a systems consultant to the Times. "Because everybody knows how
to use e-mail, they know how to use MATT."
It all starts in the lobby. Bar codes are used to log packages onto the computer network so that COF staffers can immediately see on their own machine through MATT when a package with an ad arrives in the building (both PC and Mac people can use the system). Packages are scanned again at the COF window; thereafter, an ad's status is automatically updated as a staffer works on it in the computer system.
MATT provides electronic report data so COF and the processing and ad departments can see, for instance, pending orders (plus three months of previous orders) and rates, and a trafficking component shows outstanding material. A subsequent version of MATT (dubbed MATTRes) added reservation and sales-support elements. Now any COF or ad sales rep can answer any advertiser's tracking questions without making another phone call.
"One thing that stuck out in reviewing the Times' award submission was the comprehensiveness of the approach," says NAA senior vice president for technology Eric Wolferman, who helped judge the Best Practices Awards. "It was impressive how they carefully analyzed the process of producing ads and developed a system to address those needs."
MATT is proprietary to the Times, but the development team has shown it to other papers and "would be open to share information," says Rosen. "There's no question that MATT could work with any size newspaper." Cost was minimal because some of the hardware, including the mainframe, already existed. There was an expense for the server, but the only other outlay was in staff time to develop the product.
"Since early this year the system has been full-blown, and it's been running with no problems," says Rosen. "We've added a quality assurance aspect, which automatically generates credits for problems customers have. Now we're working on integrating the ability to view ads as they would appear in the newspaper by anybody on the system."