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Number, please: Ad takers at the Indianapolis Star
and News can type in a customer's phone number
and the system will fill in many blanks.
What you see, you can sell:
At Indianapolis Newspapers Inc.,
the WYSIWYG ad display feature
of the Atex Enterprise classified
systemhas given ad takers
new upsell tools, such as
borders and boldface type.
Introducing new technology
means enterprise-wide change
INDIANAPOLIS -- When Indianapolis Newspapers Inc. bought Atex Enterprise as its classified advertising solution, it expected only to solve two immediate problems: replace an aging system and begin paginating classifieds.
In spring 1996, a venerable Atex J-11 system did give way to new client/server architecture. And two years later, classifieds are 100 percent paginated (one Sunday in September, a record 52 pages of liners and display classifieds went directly to negative).
But management at the Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis News did not expect that Enterprise would not only lift the papers from their 1980s proprietary doldrums, it would propel managers into thinking differently about technology -- how it could meet newly recognized opportunities, and how jobs could be enhanced to make people more productive by getting them more involved through computer tools.
As has happened at newspapers around the world, "technology itself has driven us to rework the workflow," said Advertising Services Director Ron Morgan. "When we took technology as a broader picture, it helped us sit down and redefine what we do -- do we really need to stamp one ad one way and another a different way?"
From such fundamental questions a new culture has developed in the labyrinthine downtown Indianapolis headquarters of the 233,000-circulation morning Star and 38,000-circulation evening News. Indianapolis Newspapers got the lead out -- and then the Linotypes -- beginning in 1973, adopting optical character recognition scanners which read copy that was "typed in triplicate," remembered Laura Bridgewater, the advertising pre-press manager.
As mainframe-based photoelectronic composition came of age, the papers moved on, installing a classified system from Atex Publishing Systems Corp. in 1980. It was joined by an Atex editorial system in 1983-84, putting the morning Star and evening News on solid ground -- so solid, the Hoosiers stood still.
So little change came during the '80s, said Keith Fleming, the advanced applications team leader, that one comment he heard about Star and News people was that they "thought the world was flat."
Flat-landers, yes, but flat-earthers? Hardly. In addition to embracing Enterprise when it was barely toddling, the papers went around the globe in 1996 to tap CCI Europe of Aarhus, Denmark, for a state-of-the-art pagination system.
"What was shocking for us," said Managing Editor Ted Daniels, "was to be on the tail end of technology, then suddenly to be in the forefront with Enterprise and CCI."
Stirred into action
Indianapolis Newspapers embarked on a search for new advertising and editorial systems as a building-wide project, drawing a dozen people from advertising, production, editorial and business.
While the J-11 classified system was selected by the production staff, this was "a totally different group," said Ron Morgan, the advertising services director, "a lot more open."
Daniels joked that he may be the only editor in the country ever immersed in selecting a classified system, but the cross-pollination of departments ensured that all departments read from the same crystal ball.
Early in 1995, classified system suppliers were invited to compete. Of the six who responded, Daniels said, the "three left standing" were CText Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich., System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento and Sysdeco, the name of the new owners of Atex. (In November 1996, Sysdeco elected to spin off what had been Atex; the new company was renamed Atex Media Solutions Inc., which is based in Bedford, Mass.)
"The old Atex was not there any more," Fleming said. "There were a lot of new people on their side and the system was totally different."
Sysdeco was in such turmoil, the Indianapolis team went six weeks without hearing from anyone at the supplier. Worried about the company's health, several people visited Sysdeco headquarters in Massachusetts. Upon inspection, they judged the company would survive.
A visit to an SII site eliminated the former 800-pound gorilla from the competition, leaving just CText and Sysdeco. They staged "dueling demos" in Indianapolis on April 19, 1995, the day the Oklahoma City federal building was bombed.
The team set about to "systematically evaluate each product," Fleming said, and Enterprise came out ahead. Criteria included price, platform, billing system, pagination and user friendliness. "Atex won out -- just barely -- in every one of those categories," he said. (This was a relief to the techies, for whom the prospect of installing an OS/2-based CText system "was not pleasing," Fleming said; CText has subsequently migrated its technology to Windows/NT.)
Others on the team judged the functionality of the two systems nearly identical, although they rated Atex better at handling logos and providing WYSIWYG functionality. While CText suffered from requiring format calls, its system had better connectivity to other systems, as well as a better indexing feature. (In fact, Fleming said, "there were nice features CText had that we're still beating on Atex about.")
On May 19, 1995, Indianapolis Newspapers made two major announcements: The news staffs of the Star and the News would be merged into one, and Atex would supply the next classified advertising solution.
Fleming said bluntly: "Atex was going to live or die with Enterprise, so this was a good time to jump on board."
Step by step, ad by ad
To bolster training, "we kind of stuck a carrot in front of users," Fleming said.
As each person passed Windows training, a PC was plunked on his or her desk; after Enterprise training, the Enterprise software was loaded. Bridgewater created her own training materials, which she called "a hindrance, but a blessing, too," as she became intimately familiar with Enterprise's features.
To get people up to speed in Enterprise, the papers decided to have ad takers practice by entering ads every day from print, rather than just porting the database from the J-11 system to a server.
"We used double entry as a troubleshooting tool for Enterprise," Fleming said, with close monitoring of the results on output. "If anything was different between J-11 and Enterprise," users filled out a form detailing discrepancies.
The day Enterprise went on-line in April 1996, there were bugs; some pages had to be repaginated between editions, because ads either were missing or had been entered twice.
Overall, though, "going live was really smooth," Fleming said. What with a new product in its infancy and a staff moving from familiar old technology, "I thought it was going to be hell week, but it wasn't."
On Bridgewater's turf, Enterprise brought significant change to the advertising pre-press operation, with two features especially welcome -- logos and WYSIWYG.
"Logos was a big deal for classified," she said. The composing room had storage space for 300 logos, and "once we hit 300, that was it." Now, of course, digital storage assures access to a practically limitless number of logos.
Being able to see ads on-screen "was really exciting," Bridgewater said. Now, thanks to WYSIWYG, certain sales reps in the phone room have authority to build their own display classified ads, saving steps and providing an opportunity to upsell at the same time.
Angie Couch is one of those people. She is a recruitment account executive, with Enterprise sitting on her desk and ideas for making ads better running through her head.
The screen on her 17-inch monitor is split vertically. Cascading down the left side are fields for entering data about the advertiser, many of which are filled automatically by just typing in the customer's phone number.
Lists abound, showing such things as the last 20 ads done, or all the publications being scheduled. Classifications are instantly available through a pop-up window; a pop-open calendar permits swift entry of insertions as far ahead as 30 days.
But Couch's heart lies with WYSIWYG. She details the list of design features Enterprise puts in her hands: reverses, background screens, logos, borders. "There's just so many different capabilities," Couch says. "You learn to do things yourself."
With logos readily available, "that's one of the big things I tell them," Couch says, "you need your logo in the ad." And now she's able to say, "This would look better with a border, let me fax you a copy," after she makes up the ad unassisted by a designer.
Enterprise doesn't support faxing from individual workstations, so as ads are created, they are printed and then faxed manually for approval.
Scheduling ads across multiple publications has "drastically improved," Fleming said. "The old system would create two or three copies to get each ad in the system for pricing." Enterprise can do it from one entry.
Bridgewater noted that a pending Enterprise upgrade would add design enhancements such as inverted corners for borders, and a multiple-content feature that will take one order and spray the ad's contents across publications with different specifications -- and maintain one-buy, one-bill by keeping track of different content numbers under a single ad number.
Morgan hails the evolution in the advertising call center, which had been populated by people who "used to know how to type" and not much more. "Now our entire classified department has transitioned into a telemarketing staff," he said.
With WYSIWYG ad construction, ad takers can promote those fee-based borders and boldface type. In 1997, 12 percent of liners wore borders, 50 percent had boldface type and five percent had logos or other graphics.
"What this doesn't say is our error rate on logos has dropped to near zero," Fleming said, saving money on makegoods the papers don't have to make.
On the job
"We weren't really prepared for full pagination," Fleming said, so ClassPag was brought up slowly.
Liners and space reservations were output to paper "for quite a while," he said, but as people got better at "putting ads in electronic form," classified migrated to full-page output to negative. Getting there relied on AdManager, a page element tracking solution from Autologic Information International Inc. of Thousand Oaks, Calif.
Now in use for more than a year, AdManager "helped us centralize the flow," Fleming said. And what a flow it is.
Kim Mills is a ClassPag paginator, building classified pages on an IBM PowerPC workstation. On his 19-inch monitor he can distinguish by color what the scores of labeled boxes mean -- light blue signifies an ad from a Mac, yellow marks a filler ad, major indexes and headers are brown, liners are khaki and Enterprise-built display ads are aqua.
ClassPag is quick: Given a run date, ClassPag will extract eight pages of ads in 30 seconds and build those pages in about three seconds. "It's pretty much instant," Mills said.
The program builds from back to front, following the papers' inverted pyramid style -- big ads appear at the top and to the outside of each page. Liners in the same category run beneath the display ads. Where they fall short, Enterprise displays the shortfall in lines, and Mills can pop open a directory of filler ads to find one of identical length.
"A lot of times, the way the machine flows it is fine," Mills said. "We don't have to change it all." Some final assembly is required, however, such as putting in column headers under display ads as needed, and of course, sometimes juggling paid ads to make room for fillers in a less conspicuous way.
While Mills can build an eight-page section from extract file to 11-by-17-inch proofs in about 30 minutes, getting the Sunday classified section out on a Friday night for the 7:30 a.m. Saturday press run is a different story.
On the last Friday in September, he checked ad status at 11:40 p.m.; 32 display ads were still out, AdManager told him. "That was good," he said. He was done about 2:30 a.m. -- an average Friday night.
The future is now
Before Enterprise, little effort was made to advance the relationship between paper and advertiser, Morgan said: "We pretty much waited until we were called and then went to pick up their ad."
That attitude is gone. Indianapolis Newspapers is helping advertisers get into fully digitized ad production, and slowly dispersing ad order entry from inside the building into the field.
"It's a result of changes in the market," Morgan said of digitized ads. "We found that everyone who has a computer wants to build their own ad any more."
Beginning in June 1996, about 80 ads a week were taken in on a variety of media in numerous formats. Now four people handle all digital ads, which may arrive via digital delivery solutions made by B-Linked Inc. of Chapel Hill, N.C., the Internet or the Associated Press's AdSEND.
"They are now processing over 400 ads a week," Morgan said, with ads from one major department store 100 percent digital.
Accommodating advertisers is the name of the game, even if it means spending money on them. "We literally gave them a PC, put the software on it there and they transmit all their text on it for us to format," Morgan said.
The $2500 cost of a PC is peanuts when the client is going to spend $500,000 on ads in the papers. "Would I go out and put a modem in? In a heartbeat," he said. Money spent saves money, he pointed out -- some composition is done outside, and the error rate is reduced.
Next up: sales force automation.
"We wanted to inch them along," Morgan said, referring to the sales staff that is being automated incrementally. Ad sales people were given laptops in the spring, taking their first sales tools into the field in April. Now those machines have Lotus Notes and Netscape web browsers for communicating and communications.
Eventually ad reps will be equipped with tools from SoftAd Inc. of Mill Valley, Calif., so that while in the field they can seamlessly go from contract management into ad order entry, with Enterprise riding alongside SoftAd on the laptop.
Pricing will be done on the spot, the result of an effort to "get every possible document that a sales rep needs electronically," Morgan said. "Our goal was to drive technology through the sales department to the customer."
Automation "cuts turnaround time of the sales call itself from two to three days to right there and then," he said. It also will markedly redistribute the ad order workload. "We used to have a single ad order system that had only two people entering ads," he said. "Now a sales rep can enter it."
Over time, the sales staff will accumulate and share information, creating a customer contact management system "that we really never had before," Morgan said. Moving from individual Rolodexes to a database chock full of marketing information will allow sharper targeting of specific customers.
For all the power and prowess sales people will have in the field, however, they won't be building spec ads, Morgan said. "We don't want them sitting in front of the customer, moving balloons in an ad."
-- Pete Wetmore
Atex Media Solutions Inc.,
(617) 275-2323,
e-mail: info@atex.com;
Autologic Information International Inc.,
(805) 498-9611,
e-mail: rmedina@autoiii.com;
CText Inc.,
(313) 677-4700,
e-mail: sales@ctext.com;
System Integrators Inc.,
(916) 929-9481,
e-mail: sii@sii.com.
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