Public face: The proposed web interface to Digital Technology International's ClassSpeed system will have two flavors -- one for commercial accounts and one for the public (shown above on the web site of DTI sibling, the Orem Daily Journal).

Pop-up prompts: The web interface for System Integrator's classified system provides a pop-up screen (similar to what the newspaper industry has known as 'upsale prompts') that give the advertiser hints about how to sell his or her product (and, not coincidentially, making more text for charges).

Good reasons to allow your advertisers to enter ads on Web

Two months ago, a web-based grocery company came to my neighborhood. I'm not positive, but I suspect that as fast as I was to sign on, plenty of other time-hungry souls beat me to it.

When I needed to find my favorite discount store (which rhymes with trumpet, sorta) in a strange city far, far from home, my surfing partner found on-line directions to get me there.

The Web, thanks to the efforts of countless and disparate different-thinking individuals and institutions, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, has become the almost-perfect, all-purpose utility on an increasingly accessible, all-purpose appliance.

It's a reference tool. It's a circle of shopping carts that reaches around the globe. It offers the camp qualities of a Texas strip mall, the understated opulence of a tiny beachside town and the overstated glitter of a shopping channel.

And it may be one of the best enhancements you can make to your classified room -- and ironically, one of your surest safeguards for your existing classified franchise.

You can figure your non-newspaper, on-line competitors will be doing everything they can, including offering free on-line resume/job matching services, to infringe on your God-given right to a classifieds monopoly in your community since you knocked off the competing newspaper in town.

So give me three good reasons for not giving your Web site visitors a chance to place a classified ad without having to visit your front desk or wait until the next customer service representative in your class-ad phone queue can get to them. Or for not giving your class-ad customers a chance to peruse your Web site, maybe for the first time.

You may find few if any reasons not to proceed to make your web site the destination of the billions and billions of web surfers, voyeurs, lurkers and geeks, as well as the soccer moms, 9-to-5-ers, garage sale junkies and auto classics connoisseurs that we all know are constantly seduced by our competitors in content, classifieds or both.

But there may be some sticky issues that you'll want to look at closely as this expression of newspaper technology evolves. Some of those people out there on the web, well, they are just a little odd. Surely we all are, but mostly we keep that to ourselves and publicize it as little as possible, unlike the unidentified entity which ran the following ad not so long ago in the San Francisco Chronicle:

MINISTER
with clean cut, excellent
presence & voice. 800-555-3677

The theory being, apparently, that a minister without a voice is pretty much a waste of time. Obviously, if you take ads on-line, you may want to ensure that no one infringes on your editorial integrity, however you've defined that. So you'll need to make sure you or your supplier has figured out a way to preview ads before they run -- whether manually or technically.

Needless to say, you have to make some arrangement for accepting payment. (After all, we need to find some way to pay for those editorial folks.) But like running the vacuum cleaner, it's always nicer to find someone else to do it. Ask your potential supplier.

Uh, and, oh yeah, you'll have to figure out how to calculate the price. And don't be surprised if your local business advertisers don't want to figure out how to run their ads this way, too, so you'll have to add those permutations -- including logos and graphics -- into the mix. And one way or another, you'll have to make those transactions secure.

Basically, there are two ways to look at suppliers: either their product runs with their system, which probably is an easy route to take if they've got what you need, or their product running with your system. Cost, maintenance, training, support, fringe benefits (like being able to give folks who come to your site access to ever-broader geographically based ad conglomerations).

Here's what suppliers told us about their products:

Adstar.com
Formerly Ad-Star Services Inc. of Marina del Rey, Calif., Adstar.com is another company that has expanded its existing turnkey line to include a web-browser based product, Ad-Star Net.

As a service bureau set-up, AdStar Net offers newspapers a publication-branded, Web-based ad-taking system, and taps into a fairly sophisticated product that already has over 2000 advertiser and advertising agency sites, and a throughput of 1.5 million ads annually to each of the more than 50 participating newspapers.

Some of those ads come from AdStar's partnership with CareerPath.com, co-founded in 1995 by six major metropolitan newspapers, hence the metropolitan nature of most of its ads.

AdOne LLC is another partner, providing access to ClassifiedWarehouse.com, which offers consumers "premium classified advertising from both leading newspapers and top-brand on-line providers."

Other partners include AdQuest 3D, a portal site AdQuest.com, whose parent company is PowerAdz, which has over 700 U.S. newspaper affiliates.

The AdStar Client interface makes the web-based advertiser available to any participating newspaper. The company also provides installation, training and ongoing support for advertisers national or local.

Advanced Technical Solutions Inc.
Since Wilmington, Mass.-based ATS has been around since 1987, you probably know that it was founded with the idea of providing a migration path to Atex customers. Now, of course, it has its own open-architecture, client/server front-end systems and has written software to integrate standard database and word processing applications into newspaper tools. It also offers hardware and maintenance programs for it and a "complete electronic production facilities management service."

AdVisor advertising system integrates Microsoft Word, Excel and a Sybase relational database. The company has integrated the award-winning GoldMine customer management system into its suite as well; GoldMine Software Corp. is located in Pacific Palisades, Calif.

You can use Crystal Reports to extract and analyze until your heart is content (and some systems types risk spending so much time in front of their computers that they lose track of what else may content their hearts). Edgil's EdgCaptur subsystem (see below) or another of your choice can handle the dollar-side of things for you.

Though not an exact parallel to other products outlined here, ATS has integrated USA.NET Ad Mail into its system. AdVisor will generate a user name and password on the spot for class ad customers.

Your customers may already have their own e-mail addresses and answering machines that remedy the now-forgotten problem of placing a car ad and then phone-sitting for the ad's duration. The integration of USA.NET with ATS offers customers an added layer of anonymity: You can still sell your stuff in the public sphere, but you can buffer yourself from the few aforementioned folks with unpleasant attitudes and behaviors.

B-Linked.com
Another turnkey system, the former B-Linked Inc., offers browser entry to agencies and transient customers. Currently it claims nearly 200 newspapers and 2500 advertisers and agencies receiving free ad-delivery service. Todd Melet, the company's founder and president, is after another 2500. Eventually, newspapers will be able to use B-Linked.com to reach all of them via Web. Beta testing for that part of the product has been taking place over the summer, and the service is expected to go live by the fourth quarter of this year.

B-Linked.com and iPrint.com, both privately held, announced a partnership at NEXPO '99. The partnership plans to target newspapers with the Virtual Ad Design Studio (Vads) -- also announced at NEXPO, and also with a predicted fourth quarter arrival -- which makes ad design, production, remote editing, proofing and delivery available to anyone with Web access and a browser in order to streamline sales, design, production ad delivery and pagination processes. "The B-Linked server acts as the receiver technology at newspapers for all ad files created through the new Vads service," says company literature.

B-Linked.com is hosted on multiple load-balanced DS3 Internet backbone connections, through multiple Internet providers. The package offers encryption, password protection, cookies, credit-card verification and IP address tracking of anyone who logs in. Transactions are monitored and authenticated, with complete transaction logging, and each document signed with a return receipt.

It's an automated, open-platform package that requires only a Web browser and integrates with existing applications and workflow. No special software or plug-ins are required. Once the product is in place, newspapers will receive final ad files from advertisers. National advertisers can localize their own ad files using a "push-button" Internet Web site or broadcast PDF files to local businesses which can add their own information.

See a demo at B-Linked.com. Under an agreement signed June 1, hosting and e-commerce solutions for B-Linked are provided by InterLan Technologies. Both companies are based in Research Triangle, N.C.

Digital Technology International
Garnering a great deal of interest for its Adobe InDesign-based systems (see The Cole Papers, July 1999), Springville, Utah's DTI may not have had time to create a web-based classified ad entry system, but it at least has sketched out some ideas and sample screens.

The company says it envisions "tightly integrating" a web browser interface to its ClassSpeed product. The plan is that there will be two "simple" entry forms, one for commercial customers with an account and password and another for the public (or transient) customers who pay in advance for their ads.

The transient screen would contain fields for the customer's credit card number (which would be encrypted upon transmission) as well as rates that default for the classification and frequency.

Edgil Associates Inc.
Based in North Chelmsford, Mass., Edgil, of course, fits into the latter category -- they specialize in connecting to your systems. EdgBiz.com is a product of Edgil's philosophy regarding on-line classified advertising, says Jeff Kosiorek, the company's marketing manager: "The next logical step is to allow advertisers to enter their ads on-line."

Kosiorek says, "The AdWizard interface provides advertisers with a quick way to enter and check on-line ads, while the Account Manager supplies the newspaper with an on-line advertising business structure, including advertiser contracts and discount rates."

EdgBiz.com gets a checkmark in many of these categories: