Ad Handling Is Still Not Quite Seamless
Advertising requires gathering data, entering them, placing the ads, proofing, billing and collecting the fees. Some say keyboarding and a few clicks of a mouse should produce correct ads on paginated pages, accurate bills and searchable World Wide Web ads.
Donna Conner, Microsoft Corp.'s Internet and information-publishing marketing manager, described the process: Hit one key, and information goes to billing, flows to pagination and feeds the Web. "An identifier says you should charge this much for it, it checks the ad table and hits this commerce-interchange pipeline."
How did suppliers, who tend to break each step into separate products, respond to this integration scenario? "I could have been speaking Swahili," she recalled.
INTEGRATION TOOLS
Practically, vendors note, classified- and display-ad software may have to operate independently or as part of an integrated advertising system. The approach depends on a newspaper's needs and the system already in place. Nevertheless, NEXPO booths housed new and traditional business-system suppliers offering advances on the road to seamless ad handling.
Baseview Products Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich., debuted AdManagerPro 2.0, providing one screen for entering classified-linage, classified-display and retail-display ads. AdManagerPro takes care of scheduling and billing, but building pages requires another program.
Cascade Systems Inc. of Andover, Mass., calls its latest product AdXChange, an extension to its DataFlow ad-management system. AdXChange provides a central location to manage incoming and outgoing traffic. It streamlines electronic-ad delivery, tracking and approval. Its work flow eliminates errors that crop up when Portable Document Format ads are converted for page placement and lets advertisers deliver ads via the Internet.
Cenosis of Laval, Quebec, offered CenoPub, a custom tracking system to verify that only the appropriate and corrected version of an ad is used.
GraphX Inc. of Allentown, Pa., a company with magazine as well as newspaper clients, showcased Adtaker, modeled with a PC-based relational database that can operate on Windows for Work Groups, Novell Netware or Windows NT. Modules handle classified and display ads separately or together, along with text-entry, scheduling, credit-control, accounting, billing and payment features. Optional QuarkXPress and Adplacer extensions offer pagination, and an Internet interface accesses the Web.
Roundhouse from Managing Editor Inc. of Jenkintown, Pa., tracks ads, logging who did what, when, and how long it took. It also ranks ads so that those facing tight deadlines get processed first. MEI's Page Director Ad Layout System 2.1 and Classified Layout System handle pagination.
"It's a powerful system for the price," said Mark Leister, Managing Editor's vice president of marketing. Such software used to cost more than $200,000; Managing Editor can provide a system for less than $100,000 for most sites, he said, and for less than $50,000 for some.
Miles 33, a British firm operating here from Darien, Conn., introduced Future Proof, a Windows classified-advertising and contact system that also generates business reports.
Tools like these help move the newspaper business along the Yellow Brick Road, but the Emerald City of digital ad-integration still shimmers in the distance.