Cooper said the No. 1 issue for him was to bring the advertising department up to speed in the use of e-mail, at home and in the office. "That also means bringing in accounting, so that information can be shared," he added.

He expects more effort to be put into systems integration.

"We've spent a lot of time and money in trying to get billing systems and classified systems to talk together," Cooper said. "Those dotted lines have to be replaced with clear two-way connections over the next few years."

The Alameda Newspaper Group, which publishes six daily newspapers in Alameda and San Mateo counties, including the Oakland Tribune, has been cautious about giving sales representatives laptop computers, Cooper said. But that is changing; he sees moving toward laptops "in the next budget cycle."

Training is the focus of Cooper's concern about giving sales people computers.

"If you think you've got nightmares in systems now," he said, "just wait until that happens. We can all complain about training in editorial, but they generally know a computer. Sales reps come in not knowing what a computer looks like."

After e-mail and laptops, Cooper's biggest concerns are alternative digital ad delivery.

"We just had a request: Three advertisers want to deliver their ads via e-mail," he said. Others have mentioned they would like to deliver ads via the Internet's File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

Mining and warehousing
A number of newspapers around North America have invested in data warehousing and data mining, but none equals what's been done at Thomson Newspapers of Stamford, Conn.

A data warehouse includes information from all systems -- billing, circulation, classified, database marketing, sometimes editorial and payroll -- to establish a repository where management can ask specific questions. Data miners enter the warehouse to perform intricate comparisons, producing correlations management might find beneficial.

"For us, the single most important benefit is to go to one place to get the data," said Steve Strout, Thomson's vice president for technology, in explaining how his company's 75 dailies are using data warehousing and mining. "Our senior vice president of sales says we want to go to an advertiser and tell them everything about their business."

Thomson has installed data warehousing at six sites, Strout said; revenues at those sites have increased 3.5 percent a month for six months. "Our payback is less than three years," he said, "even understanding we're going to sink a lot of money into it."

Thomson is restructuring newspapers' sales teams so that they are both geographically focused and organized toward vertical markets as well, Strout said. "They'll know all the information about competitors, and it's good to pit competitors against one another," he said.

Thomson also is abolishing the distinction between retail and classified advertising. "Now there's display and liners, and they get spiffs on classifieds," he said.

Thomson modified the data warehousing software it is using to generate leads on advertisers "who won't cause you a lot of grief" -- in other words, advertisers who aren't debt-ridden and are more likely to provide their own digital ad files.

"The hardware cost is humongous," Strout said. "We're buying 250 gigabytes a year. Lease these puppies -- the software, the tools, the database, everything."

Thomson has found 62 percent of the data sent to the warehouse to be clean, Strout said; the remainder requires hand manipulation to get it into a format that can be used.

"Our revenues have gone up, our circulation retention has gone up," Strout said -- the ultimate explanation as to why Thomson has endured the process.

Internet University
"Our competition is immense," said Sean Breen, the national on-line advertising manager for Knight Ridder's Miami Herald, in his talk about competing on the Web. "All of them see newspaper advertising as a sitting duck. The classifieds businesses are the most vulnerable."

In a co-presentation with Susan Brandt, the Herald's on-line marketing and promotion manager, Breen outlined the paper's (and Knight Ridder's) strategy for on-line classifieds:

Each of the category-specific services have common features, Breen and Brandt said. They have searchable databases, there is related editorial content, and directions and mapping are provided to get the consumer to the advertiser. Each service also has tools for consumers -- at HomeHunter, the tool kit would include a mortgage calculator; at CarHunter, a car payment calculator.

For JobHunter, Breen said, the trick is to "figure out how to migrate [advertisers' job] databases to the paper's database."

Brandt talked about the Knight Ridder strategy for competing with "entertainment sites," such as Digital Cities and Sidewalk. She asked, "Who should be providing that content but newspapers?"

The strategy included development of the "most comprehensive source" of entertainment information on the Web, which would include movies, music, dining and stage productions, she said. In addition, the entertainment sites -- which Knight Ridder localizes, as in Just Go South Florida -- feature "best bet" pages that highlight editors' choices on current concerts, movies, performances and restaurant reviews.

Perhaps the most cutting-edge item in Breen and Brandt's presentation was what Knight Ridder is calling Internet University.

"Once a quarter," Breen said, "we bring in six print sales people and give them intensive training on the laptop for six weeks." The goal, he said, is to make these people not only Internet experts, but also to allow them to be ambassadors for the on-line products among the print sales staff and customers.

"They impress prospects in presentations on how the Internet products really work and how they tie back to print," said Breen.

Unified advertising system
As every good newspaper ad director should, Steven Westphal of the Grand Rapids Press in Michigan placed a classified ad for something he desired:

"Wanted: A Unified Advertising System! Must be able to handle all aspects of newspaper publishing business. Desirable qualities: Save users time, money, and make their lives more productive. Will pay reasonable rate. Interested parties please call. ..."

Unfortunately for Westphal, no one has called because such a system doesn't exist. That doesn't mean newspapers don't need it, it just means suppliers haven't been listening.

"Sales people only spend 13.9 hours face-to-face with customers or prospects in an average week," Westphal said. Saying that this was too little time, he suggested that a unified advertising system might allow sales people to spend more time with the people who give newspapers money.

"Effective information management practices are the key to success," Westphal said, emphasizing that the reasons for a unified advertising system include market and competitive issues, customer-driven concerns, productivity issues and financial considerations.

The ad director of the 140,000-circulation daily said that in "the big picture," newspapers need a comprehensive publishing system that works across all information and distribution lines -- advertising, editorial, new media, operations and production, finance, circulation and distribution.

Westphal described current offerings as "interface models" where a third-party system acts as a central "traffic control center" for multiple data sources. In its current environment, the Press undertakes 18 functions, he said, but it takes 13 suppliers to support them.

The disadvantages of living with an interfaced advertising system include:

To counteract these forces, Westphal said, a unified advertising system would be just the trick. It would have a common database where all information would be warehoused, accessible to all users -- efficiently, accurately and in the format desired.

His 1997 search for such a system was fruitless.

Leaning on laptops
Calling sales force automation "really a necessity in the '90s," John Kelly of The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., talked of his experiences with deploying laptop computers at both the 105,000-circulation Gannett daily and his previous employer, the Sacramento Bee.

Of Gannett's 88 newspapers, he said, more than 54 have equipped their salespeople with laptop computers, mostly running the company's Mobile Advertising Sales System (Mass).

Pointing out that newspapers define the phrase "sales force automation" differently, Kelly said Mass is based on the concept of order entry, with electronic insertion orders and account history, which includes linage, payments and other charges. Salespeople download the information from a Mass server every morning before they start work.

In addition to Mass, Kelly said, a typical Gannett salesperson would have Microsoft Office (for word processing, spreadsheets and e-mail), Astound and Macromedia Director (for general presentations), Media Marketing's Immediate product line (for sales presentations) and Now Up-to-Date/Contact (for contact management and datebook).

Another key aspect of Gannett's sales force automation is to "attempt to save the rain forests": the laptop computers have been equipped with digital versions of all the company's forms, contracts and reports. Kelly publishes a daily "electronic newspaper" he calls Clips, which is designed to keep the sales staff "the best informed people on the street and welcomed by their customers."

Kelly said his paper has prepared a series of "self-running generic" presentations that are available in the "presentation library." He said The Clarion-Ledger currently has more than 50 such presentations on its Mass server.

Rating, on the other hand, is currently too complex to attempt to build into a computer program that isn't always linked to the office, Kelly said.

Acknowledging that his setup isn't all that different from virtually all newspapers that have sales force automation, Kelly said, "The fun stuff starts with our latest toys."

Gannett has developed a software application it calls Virtual Ad. Now in testing, the program allows a salesperson to display a digital version of a generic edition of the paper. A spec ad of any size can be "plopped" onto a page to show a retailer exactly what the impact of the desired ad might be.

The digital paper can be closed, then reopened. The salesperson can page through the paper to show the retailer how the ad works in the paper. Should the retailer not be impressed, Virtual Ad allows the salesperson to resize the spec ad or add color.

Kelly said the paper has tried out other "toys":

Kelly called the process a success: "We know we're saving time, we're selling more ads -- and we're not only beating last year's sales numbers, we're beating budget."

-- dmc

Gannett Media Technologies International,
(513) 665-3777,
e-mail: info@gmti.gannett.com;
Harris Publishing Systems Corp.,
(407) 242-5330,
e-mail: jfitch@harris.com;
Junglee Corp.,
(408) 522-9490;
Macromedia Inc.,
(415) 252-2000;
Media Marketing Inc.,
(303) 440-7855,
e-mail: mminc@immediatesfa.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, February 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.