Some publishers, though, are stalling, and those that do accept digital display ads seem to each have their own methods for accepting them.

Sessions at Seybold Boston, held Feb. 26-March 1, and at the Newspaper Association of America's Operations SuperConference, held March 3-8 in Miami Beach, Fla., attempted to address the myriad issues surrounding these problems.

Guide for newspaper advertisers
After 15 months of development, the Newspaper Association of America unveiled at its Florida meeting a new publication, Digital Advertising: The NAA Guide to Digital Processing of Newspaper Ads.

The 22-page booklet is designed to help advertisers and agencies prepare digital ads using methods that newspapers can easily handle. The NAA sells copies of the Guide to its newspaper members for them to distribute to their customers.

It was put together by the Digital Advertising Task Force, comprising more than 70 members who represented newspapers, advertisers and third-party companies that deliver advertising. (Conflict-of-interest alert: the editor and publisher of this journal was a member of the task force as part of the services he provides the NAA.)

The project was led by Grover Livingston, the vice president for information management at the Dallas Morning News. It was broken down into four groups, addressing electronic data interchange or EDI (chaired by Barbara Boyer of the Chicago Tribune), a portable ad format (chaired by Ed Lehr of the St. Paul [Minn.] Pioneer Press), best practices (chaired by Richard Masotta of the Boston Globe) and quality (co-chaired by Paul Lynch of Tribune Co. and Robin Shank of Knight-Ridder Inc.).

The task force met six times as a large group, starting in late 1994; smaller cross-functional groups met four more times. The working groups would present their findings to the larger group, and all participants had an opportunity to voice their concerns about how the Guide was shaping up.

The NAA publication has six sections:

The Guide is available from the NAA; in quantity, each copy costs less than $10.

Magazines and agencies
Digital display ad issues also were addressed at Seybold Boston by a panel moderated by this writer. The highlights:

Frank Scott, Time Inc.'s director of pre-press development and the testing chairman of Ddap, told the Boston crowd that a recent survey of the magazine giant's printers has indicated that all will have computer-to-plate systems in place by the end of the year.

"I feel there is a lack of understanding of digital production at ad agencies and at the ad production departments of most publishers," Scott said. "In my opinion, the only people who have a real understanding of digital ad production today are the trade shops and printers."

Scott said the Ddap was to have distributed an Adobe Photoshop plug-in that allows TIFF/IT files to be read "on any Macintosh." Scott also said PDF, the Portable Document Format currently supported only by Adobe's Acrobat technology, was being extensively tested by Ddap.

Asking the question, "How to get digital ads, disks or transmissions?", Scott said that though shipping disks is probably the preferred method today, "FedEx is relatively slow, and at $50 to $100 per disk, shipping disks you'll never see again can get quite expensive."

Scott said, "The file formats are available as are the methods to send and receive ads. The key to make this happen is to get involved and, to borrow the slogan from a popular sports shoe, 'Just do it.'"

"There isn't a heck of a lot of pressure or desire to go to digital advertising" on the part of agencies, Queen said.

In the current processes, agencies have numerous opportunities to mark up costs which are passed along to advertisers, he noted. Current arrangements also provide agencies with opportunities to spread the blame in the event something goes awry, Queen said.

"I have not been there when an agency has eaten the production costs when the color goes bad in an ad," he said.

In addressing a dilemma faced by many newspapers, Queen asked, "What do you do with camera-ready material when you don't have a camera room?"

Report from the front lines
Back at the NAA Operations SuperConference, one executive reported on her experiences on the front lines of the digital ad delivery war.

Since 1994, Kara Gabbert, the ad service representative of the St. Petersburg Times, has worked to put together a set of procedures to enable the Florida paper's advertisers to take advantage of digital ad delivery.

Gabbert's colleagues were concerned about the pace of technological change. Gabbert pointed out that in 1994, there were "five software applications and four removable media formats" in common use -- and they're still commonly used today.

To prove her point, Gabbert developed a survey to be distributed to the Times' advertisers that asked such questions as, "Where are your ads produced now? By an agency, in-house, the Times, etc.?"

A second part of the questionnaire was aimed at advertisers who used desktop publishing techniques to build ads.

When the results came in, Gabbert found that "the majority of our advertisers indicated that they were already or planning to create their ads on a Macintosh with Quark XPress, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, and preferred to submit their ads on SyQuest cartridges.

"What a surprise!"

The survey results prompted Gabbert and the staff at the Times to design guide sheets for use by advertising reps and advertisers themselves.

Initially, there were three sheets: one for the ad rep and two for the advertiser. Because the Times requires an advertiser to submit a test ad before beginning routine digital delivery, one guide was a checklist that accompanied the test ad. The other sheet for advertisers was a general fact guide.

"In retrospect, I think these first sheets were too much," Gabbert said, "and most likely not completely read. That's why they have gone through several revisions. The next round generated two guide sheets, one for advertising as an internal reference, and the other was a more user-friendly checklist for the advertiser."

Gabbert said the Times worried about font issues "for quite a while," but after contacting a number of font foundries, the paper decided it was within legal rights to use fonts included or embedded with the jobs -- as long as they were used for nothing else.

In addition, the paper purchased "an extensive font library" from Adobe Systems. "In deadline situations," said Gabbert, "where fonts have been missing, this library has become a lifesaver."

This system worked, Gabbert said, until the inevitable happened: change.

"First, third-party vendors entered the ring, each with their own way of receiving, sending, transmitting and downloading. Second, more advertisers wanted to use their modems. And third, everyone with a desktop scanner and a copy of Photoshop was instantly an imaging expert.

"Yikes!" she said.

By breaking up the workflow by source -- ads on disk, ads via modem and ads delivered by third parties -- the paper surmounted these new assaults on continuity.

Imaging issues became the focus of another guide sheet; contact names and phone numbers of the Times' imaging department were included.

The paper then focused on personnel issues, bringing PostScript output knowledge into the production department and building an Electronic Output Office.

The workers in the Electronic Output Office then taught other production employees the main software packages, the various third-party delivery systems, methods for effective advertiser and supplier communications, and how to flow the different types of ads through the Times network.

More guides and manuals were developed for internal use, and training seminars for ad reps were offered. More than 250 Times employees were trained in the summer of '95.

Gabbert is quite pleased with the system at the St. Petersburg paper and believes the results are easy to see.

"I very rarely hear any more requests for 'sky quests' or 'Irish proofs' done in 'quirk,'" she said.

-- dmc

Newspaper Association of America,
(703) 648-1000.

See also: Hello, good-bye

From THE COLE PAPERS, April 1996, Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved.