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| July 2003 |
Tearsheet suppliers refine products; newcomers arriveLAS VEGAS -- An old joke in newspapering goes something like: "This is the only business that spends thousands of dollars and hundreds of man-hours to develop a product and then entrusts it to a 12-year-old for delivery." Obviously an old joke, because today few papers are actually use "youth delivery" (aka paperboys) anymore, but you could reword the joke a bit and say, "This is the only business that spends thousands of dollars and hundreds of man-hours to develop an all-digital product and then entrusts the U.S. Postal Service to deliver it." Well, not all of it, but certainly to a significant readership: advertisers. Proof-of-publication of advertising -- tearsheets -- have until a few years ago worked the way they did since the hot-metal days: a bunch of clerks tear pages out of the paper, fold them neatly, put them into envelopes, address the envelopes and mail those envelopes off to advertisers. There is also the added factor that some of the envelopes get lost, so the process is repeated -- often multiple times. And, adding insult to efficiency, sometimes ad sales executives are obliged to drive a tearsheet out to a complaining customer. Of course today the only papers that hand-process tearsheets are hopelessly behind the times. Electronic tearsheets are now in vogue and have swept the industry. Well, at least swept the supplier industry. While we had a list of 22 companies showing some type of electronic tearsheet system at NEXPO 2002, this year the list has shrunk somewhat: we're down to a baker's dozen (plus two). The product category has crystallized somewhat in the last year as well: suppliers fall into three main categories, two subcategories and three sub-subcategories. The systems are either hosted web services, in-house web product or e-mail; further they are either scanned pages or pages from the digital output of the paper, and of those that are digital output, they are represented as either Portable Document Format (PDF), Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) or eXtensible Markup Language (XML). While you can't mix-and-match, you can pretty much find a supplier that will probably meet your need. The two leading suppliers are:
Pioneers, new offerings
Ad Looks Inc., another pioneer in the field, lists four newspapers as customers, though the company handles the scanning of tearsheets for almost 150 advertising agencies and retailers. In addition, the Rocklin, Calif.-based Ad Looks put out a press release last year saying it had struck a deal with Cox Newspapers Inc. to provide the service to even the publisher's smallest dailies. The company provides a hosted web-based service and the images are high-resolution Jpegs. Atex Media Command (AMC) of Bedford, Mass., Engage Inc. of North Andover, Mass., and Graphic Enterprises Inc. (GEI) of North Canton, Ohio, each have one customer for their products. The AMC service, called eTearsheet, uses the paper's digital workflow as a source for its service but it has an interesting twist: rather than the usual PDF file, eTearsheet uses the SVG format, which is more compact; the downside to SVG is that there are a lot more PDF viewers than SVG viewers out there. AMC's customer is the Arizona Republic. Engage's big electronic tearsheet customer is the Wall Street Journal (and it's hard to get bigger than that). Right now, though, the company isn't particularly focused on its AdApproval product (it didn't exhibit here at NEXPO); during the show the company announced that it was insolvent and that it had entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Engage has found a buyer for its assets and should the courts allow it, its assumed that AdApproval will become the property of Scene7 Inc. of Novato, Calif., a maker of dynamic imaging systems, which has among its investors one named The Hearst Corp. The GEI product, called Electronic Tear Sheet Server, is designed to be used in-house (but see its relationship to Presteligence, below) and provides a variety of standard web-based functions including thumbnail representations of pages and links between the invoice and the ad. It has been in use for almost two years at New York's Buffalo News. In the still-seeking-customers category are Jim Kelley & Associates Inc. of Wilkes Barre, Pa., and Gannett Media Technologies Inc. of Cincinnati; both market the JK&A DTS-800 system, which relies upon a high-speed scanner and in-house database (see The Cole Papers, April 2003). Novus Print Media of Plymouth, Minn., has placed its adPop system with a variety of retailers (the company is a big ad placement firm), but at this point has yet to have sold a newspaper. The system e-mails the tearsheet to the advertiser. Which brings us to the new products shown at NEXPO for the first time. Five players with related product lines that are established and one new-comer round out our scorecard:
Suddenly server
Not good. Solution No. One would be to get all the papers on the same system; antitrust, restraint-of-trade and other lawyerly issues -- not to mention the contrariness of newspaper publishers --impede that. Solution No. Two would be to build a mega-search engine that could go to all the web databases of newspaper tearsheets and build an advertiser a directory of all their ads that ran, for example, today. Good. And, for the last 18 months, a valiant crew of newspaper executives jas been trying to do that. "We were working the NAA [Newspaper Association of America] and the AP [Associated Press], and they said they were interested," said Bob Dagostino, a member of the NAA committee on all things digital tearsheets who in real life is the digital advertising manager of the Plain Dealer. But at a meeting around the first of the year, the news cooperative appeared to have lost interest in building the tearsheet search engine. "We thought it was a dead issue, just at the time e-tearsheets are getting more and more popular," Dagostino said. But at NEXPO the news cooperative indicated that it still had interest in building the system. "It's not their No. One priority," Dagostino said, but discussions between the committee and the owner of the AdSEND and AdVantage advertising delivery and ordering systems have been restarted. -- dmc
Ad Looks Inc., From THE COLE PAPERS, July 2003 |
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