Things could still be better. Communication exchange remains fractured in key areas. One day, perhaps, advertising production will discover its Holy Grail – when metadata attached to every advert delivers the copy from sender to receiver and straight into the page; no phone calls, no missed copy deadlines, no panic.
Will it happen any time soon? Stephen Irving couldn’t be more to the point in response: “No.”
Thankfully, the head of advertising production at Mirror Group doesn’t require much persuasion to articulate a great deal more. Irving goes on: “It’s the next big challenge for delivery systems and publishers to crack. It’s an elusive one. Probably 70% of our ads are repeat business, so do you give every piece of booking information out, knowing that most of it will never be used? How do you filter what will be delivered as new from what will be just repeat copy? You don’t want to just flood delivery systems with useless booking information.
“And every time an ad has an amendment to it, do you resend it even if the amendment does not affect the insertion or the size? Should that go out as a job ticket? Who do you supply this information to? Because agencies that are not delivering ads but booking space really don’t need it; it’s the repro company that’s delivering the file that needs it. So if you give it to the agency, will it get passed to the repro company? It’s managing to target the production person that needs the information to supply the file and that’s not always easy.
“You want to be able to target the actual file supplier with a viable job ticket, and I think
that ticket has to come from our production database, and that the recipient should be able to use that ticket for whatever method of supply he chooses.”
He observes that with the existence of AdsML, tickets should be produced to a standard which should be used by all parties that are delivering files. They should be able to use it globally for whatever flavour of delivery system they use. Both Vio and Adstream are keen to take it on and he’s aware that they are working hard to come up with solutions around the issue. He continues: “Their job tickets are pretty much there. It’s actually getting to the supplier the right information to put into it; getting that final link is the final challenge. But who do you give the information to?
“It’s really about communicating the insertion information at the earliest possible point. We spend a lot of effort trying to track down where copy supply is coming from, and what that copy will be used for. Someone out there in the agency world knows that information. An ad might be intended to run on two occasions one week and once the next week. If we had that information in the first file delivered then we would only have to do that ad once, but we tend to have to chase all three insertions.”
All the delivery systems have a special instructions field, where insertion dates can be entered, so if senders put the information into the file, then the newspaper can act on it at the earliest possible opportunity, he says. “It would make everyone’s lives easier; but sometimes it’s really difficult to find out who is dealing with a particular ad at an agency; there might be people on holiday, all sorts of things. The sooner we can have insertion information, the better it is for us and the better it is for them.”
A smile: “It’s that old thing: we’re in the communication business and we communicate badly. If we could tie things into database engines that interrogate each other and use job tickets, maybe it would happen.”
It’s a comprehensive answer, by any standards. Irving has seen a lot of positive change in the advertising supply chain since his apprenticeship in hot metal and his first taste of newspapers at the East Kent Messenger in the early 1980s, so all the comments above are made in consideration of a wider appreciation of progress made. He has been at the Mirror since 1991 following a brief venture into magazine repro, which was quickly threatened by Apple’s introduction of the Mac SE and the onset of desktop publishing. Newspapers seemed to offer a more stable future – a decision that after nearly 20 years in the job has certainly been justified, even if the future of newspapers themselves is increasingly called into question nowadays.
In that respect, how much is he involved with advertising for Mirror Group’s websites? “The digital side is totally separate at the moment,” Irving replies, adding: “We will look for links as we move forward, but it’s not happening at the moment.”
So we’re talking about adverts for print only, across a range of publications that includes not only the obvious ones of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and The People, but also the Racing Post and a raft of magazine-quality supplements.
It’s 5pm on a Monday and the banks of desks outside Irving’s office seem strangely quiet to those uninitiated in newspapers. Things will be a lot more hectic come Thursday and Friday he promises, as ads are chased for the weekend editions, before the rest of the world goes home for a couple of days rest. The days of gatekeeper repro suppliers have gone, replaced in many ways by the delivery systems of Adstream and Vio. Everything comes through these now, providing the Mirror with the confidence that copy will run well. There is no issue with strange file formats and no stacks of disks piling up around the office.
Irving professes himself to be fairly happy with these systems and the certified soft proofing they can provide. He says: “We stipulated that ads come in through these delivery mechanisms or we don’t touch it, and we let the marketplace decide the value of that. There are plenty of companies that offer very reasonable file conversion and forwarding services; it’s for the client to get the best price they can.
“At the high end, we have got it mostly right. The large repro companies and agencies that are supplying our main clients’ material are pretty much on the ball. There’s the ability now with what’s in the marketplace to deliver files that are correct for us. From that arena, 99% of the time you are getting files that are good to go.
“The people we overlook are the smaller advertisers that don’t have access to these types of people and the knowledge and understanding they bring with them. That’s an area we need to try and focus on for the future. They have always been important to us, but we need to actually give them viable tools to deliver files cheaply and effectively to our standard.”
It often comes down to a matter of education, and that’s something that Irving and his team are happy to engage in, because they appreciate the complexities of creating files for a newspaper.
“We talk to anyone that wants to supply us an ad, point out their choices and explain why they should get proper help in putting files together, because it’s not easy to produce files for a newspaper. We have that horrible stuff called newsprint that we have to print on and there’s no application that comes out of the box to do that; you need to tailor it and understand what you’re tailoring for and that’s always going to be difficult to get across to the smaller companies.”
He believes the industry is slowly getting there with some of the things that Vio and Adstream are doing. “It’s a lot better now than it was, but it’s still a difficult concept for a small supplier to pick up that there’s a cost to delivering an ad. They have paid for their space, and then to have to pay for delivering the ad as well can seem a bit harsh. It’s no different to posting a letter though; you expect to have to buy a stamp. It’s that stamp that small suppliers sometimes don’t accept.”
Mirror Group has just become one of the first newspaper groups to install Vio’s AdSEND system, which levies a flat rate fee of £4 per ad regardless of size, and this will certainly help these kinds of advertisers. “We’re always looking to try and improve and AdSEND is a good addition,” says Irving.
He’s looking further ahead too, with some wishful thinking for an online system that delivers files and instigates bookings. One current problem is that sometimes ads are delivered without the Mirror even having a booking for them.
“Someone believed it should be in the paper,” he reasons. “If we can get those ads into the paper we are actually servicing the client in a more proactive way. Quite probably someone, somewhere has a schedule that says the ad is going to the Mirror, but no-one told the Mirror and by the time it arrives it’s too late.
“If people can book their material online, which will instigate the delivery of a file at a later point, that’s something that I think will help everyone. It’s almost reverse engineering the process: rather than a phone call with the sales person, the booking is online; it’s confirmed by the sales person and the file is delivered. That’s the future. A change in culture is required for that sort of thing to happen though.”