- Home >
- News >
- Archive 2006 >
- News Release
CASA EDITORIAL EL TIEMPO SELECTS PBS MEDIAPLUS® CLASSIFIED ADVERTISING AND MEDIAPLUS® iSERVICES ONLINE ORDER ENTRY SYSTEMS
Increased Automation and Revenue Enhancing Features Indicate Strong ROI
Minneapolis, MN – February 23, 2006 – Publishing Business Systems, North America’s leading source for integrated enterprise–wide newspaper business software systems, today announced an agreement with Casa Editorial El Tiempo to license PBS MediaPlus® Classified Advertising, MediaPlus® Pagination and MediaPlus® iServices Order Entry.
Casa Editorial El Tiempo is the leading media company in Colombia with a collection of television, Internet, and newspaper properties. The country’s largest daily newspaper, El Tiempo, maintains a Sunday circulation of 496,000 and books an average of 7,200 classified ads daily and up to 10,300 classified ads on Saturdays. In addition to El Tiempo, CEET owns a series of weekly, weekday–only, classified guides and recruitment, automotive and real estate web sites that generate classified advertising revenue.
CEET sells classified advertising through four main channels that reach across the country. In addition to an internal call center, it supports over 20 walk–in service center locations, more than 50 outside sales representatives and a variety of branded Internet sites. In searching for a new system, CEET’s goal was to find a software partner with the system flexibility and technology platform to help it consolidate its information and automate their business processes. “Our market is expanding and we needed a partner with experience in growing and scaling newspaper operations successfully,” remarked Ricardo Pombo, classifieds and new media director, Casa Editorial El Tiempo. “MediaPlus Classified Advertising will give us more robust information for strategic planning and easier access to the business, customer and demographic data that we need for new product development.” Added benefits include the set-up tools in MediaPlus Classified Advertising which will help CEET bring new products to market in less time.
MediaPlus Classified Advertising will also allow CEET to generate new revenue through a wide variety of extras and new up–selling features including priority placement within classifications. “The PBS system gives us the tools to increase our revenue per ad and to provide better customer service by giving our reps quick access to more information. They’ll be able to place ads faster and with fewer errors,” said Fabio Arturo Ardila, advertising system project manager, Casa Editorial El Tiempo. CEET also licensed MediaPlus Pagination to fully automate a currently manual pagination process. “Up until now, we’ve kept our pagination process manual – which has given us the flexibility to be creative and design pages the way we want them. Pagination will still give us some creative options and will save us hours in production time, allowing us to extend our deadlines and bring in more daily ad revenue.”
MediaPlus iServices Order Entry is an online, customer self–service classified order entry system integrated with MediaPlus Classified Advertising for real–time data transfer. For CEET, online classifieds is a growing part of its business in terms of the number of transactions and revenue generated per order. On average, revenue per order for ads submitted online is 30% higher compared to call center orders. This is expected to grow with the added up–selling features available in iServices Order Entry. Ricardo Pombo notes, “With our current volume and projected online growth, we really needed a partner that could provide a future for us on the Internet. PBS has the technology and vision to support our direction.”
MediaPlus Classified Advertising, available with Oracle® or Microsoft® SQL database compatibility, is being installed on SQL for CEET. MediaPlus® solutions accommodate localization to different markets and PBS will provide software translation utilities to CEET so that it can easily localize the application screens to Spanish.
