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AdSpeed is DTI’s powerful display ad design tool centered on Adobe’s InDesign. AdSpeed is not a set of plugins to InDesign, but an integrated design component of DTI’s Liquid Media publishing solution.
Electronic ads More customers are making up their ads and submitting them electronically to newspapers than ever before. National advertisers are being attracted to newspapers through the speed and convenience of electronic ad delivery. The problems these electronic ads represent, however, have become myriad – from missing graphics and fonts to images that won’t output or don’t look right if they do. Handling these ads is requiring special departments.
AdSpeed was designed to address the electronic ad problem. AdSpeed handles PDF files in their native format, because it is based upon Adobe InDesign. It can directly load PDF ads into its database, route the ads where they belong, allow them to be edited, and save them for pagination. It can even export the ads to EPS without any intermediate handling, for pagination in non–DTI systems.
Eliminating the work of having to reformat a PDF file in order to paginate is not the only area where a lot of unnecessary time and expense is wasted. Accepting and managing the ads once they are sent in can be a workflow bottleneck. DTI has created an option for AdSpeed called AdReady, to make it easy for advertisers to submit their electronic ads, and for the database to do all the work of loading and preparing the ads including matching the ad up with existing customer account and billing information. AdReady allows advertisers to log–in through an Internet browser, schedule an ad and submit the PDF file. With no pre–processing steps, and no special handling, electronic ads move directly into the ad production workflow and into the billing system.
The first compelling reason to move your ad production to AdSpeed is that it will enable your newspaper to efficiently and productively handle any volume of electronic ads.
Media content management The second compelling reason to switch to AdSpeed is it’s superior database. Unlike all competitive ad databases, which are simply header bases designed to track the files of desktop programs, AdSpeed’s integral database manages the content of ads. That means graphics and logos and photos are in the database and part of the ad, not just files that are simply pointed to. The first advantage of this is there are no more missing graphics at output time. The second advantage is separate and expensive–to–maintain OPI systems can be eliminated. Your system no longer needs to deal with keeping a high–resolution image and a low–resolution image for every graphic and being sure if one is changed or deleted the other is updated as well. You no longer have to figure out how and when to delete graphics that are not in use.
DTI’s ad media database delivers images to ads and maintains bi–directional relational database links between the image file and the layout of the ad. It also can tell when graphics are no longer in use by the absence of such relational links, enabling the automation of purging or archiving such images. In addition, only one version of an image needs to be saved even if it is being used in many different ads.
DTI’s ad database enables workflow routing of ads through the full process from creation to proofing. But unlike other systems which base workflows on the passing of files from one location and operation to the next, AdSpeed manages from within the database. The ads don’t travel anywhere, which means they don’t get lost, renamed, or corrupted. AdSpeed simply updates the access information in the database to different workstations for each ad. The database time–and–date stamps each status change, so tracking against deadline, productivity reports, and ad job costing are all available as natural by–products of simply doing the ad production work. A content management database is far superior to a file tracking database, because it can do so much more without external intervention.
When AdSpeed is used in conjunction with NewsSpeed, DTI’s editorial pagination system, another advantage accrues: ads paginate themselves directly from the database. Since the ad database maintains runlist and placement information for every ad in every edition of every publication, ads will automatically track directly from the database onto the pages they are planned to run on. The status of each ad while it is being produced is known to the pagination system. And when the ad gets final sign–off it will appear on the page. Any last minute change of an ad in the database is immediately reflected on the pages.
With DTI’s system, the typical problem of getting ad files turned into EPSF files and moved into a location where a pagination system can see them for pagination is eliminated. Pagination of ads takes place by simply changing the status flag in the database. AdSpeed and NewsSpeed databases maintain relational database links between the content of the pages; final output comes from the combined databases as if they were one.
For newspaper groups, there is another major addition to this database advantage that can be realized. DTI has unique database technology that can tie multiple ad and ad media databases together over a wide area network, called AdShare. In 2000, Cox Newspapers was awarded the National Newspaper Association’s “Best Practices Award” in the Business Category, for its use of AdShare among its 16 daily newspapers.
AdShare enables each newspaper to share in the spec ads of it sister newspapers, greatly expanding the creative power and the selling potential of its sales force (a recent CoxNet newsletter had the headline: AdShare ads selling like hotcakes). In fact, many live ads in one geographic area can be used as spec ads in another area. AdSpeed with AdShare will greatly increase a newspaper group’s creative sales support resources by making all of the resources of the entire group available to each individual newspaper. Ad sales will increase.
Ad Proofing Getting ad proofs back to advertisers and signed off is an expensive and time–consuming process. AdSpeed has a new better way, which can save hours of time, diminish output expense, reduce the need for couriers and vehicles and serve customers better.
AdSpeed is integrated with DTI’s AdProof solution, which enables designers and advertising customers to collaborate on changes and updates to their ads via the internet. When a designer gives an ad a particular status, the customers is notified via email that they can proof their ad online. A URL link in the email takes the customer to a login page where they can securely view a high–quality image of their ad. They can drag and drop electronic “sticky notes” onto the ad and type comments about what they would like changed. When they are finished, their comments can be submitted back to the designer in AdSpeed who can see the notes (in the same place the customer dragged them) and make the requested changes.
When all changes are approved, the customers can electronically sign off on the ad, and this signoff is stored in the database for your records.
High Design AdSpeed is an integrated ad design tool built around Adobe’s powerful InDesign product. While DTI was one of the first developers to adopt InDesign, it was not for the design reasons you might think. InDesign does have amazing shadowing, transparency, color blending, curved text path, and styling features. But it is truly unique from a design standpoint for reasons many people often overlook. Adobe’s AGM (Adobe Grahics Manager) is a powerful on–screen RIP in the sense that Adobe uses postscript as the language for screen display. What this means is what you see on the screen is much closer to what you truly get when you output. There is no translation step (where graphics and fonts often get corrupted) between the screen display and printing.
InDesign is also designed to take full advantage of OpenType font technology. Not only does this give you cross–platform publishing capability (designers can work on PCs or Macs interchangably), it also gives you powerful font control for true fractions, ligatures, superscript and subscript, and all caps. In addition, optical kerning and multi–line composition (paragraphs re–hyphenate themselves to obtain the best possible word breaks given the amount of space) are powerful InDesign features.
Add to these unlimited undo and redo, object styles, libraries (which can be saved in the DTI database and associated with a designer’s user profile), and InDesign’s natural integration to Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat, and now the tools previously owned by Macromedia and you have an unbeatable design application for building powerhouse display ads.
High Productivity With all those powerful design features it is critical to not only preserve the productivity of your design team, but to increase it. AdSpeed is extremely scriptable, via Applescript, Visual Basic, and Javascript. DTI has already written several powerful automation tools and scripts to assist customers in enhancing their productivity, relative to their specific workflows. AdSpeed Extra allows highly–formatted ads like real estate layouts to be created automatically, based on tagged data and images submitted to the system by the advertiser. AdSpeed CopyChaser assists the London Telegraph in gathering and tracking the different components of their ads through the entire workflow.
You don’t have to implement scripting solutions, however, to increase your productivity in ad creation. DTI’s powerful database workflow, with components like the Data Center, Message Center, and Search Center allow designers to quickly work on ads and all associated media files (graphics, photos, video and audio clips, and more) as well as collaborate with other designers, sales reps, and even customers.
Internet advertising and the future AdSpeed is only one component of DTI’s Liquid Media publishing solution. DTI’s ClassSpeed and Web Order Entry products allow advertisers to create ad orders for all types of ads using one system. Display ads, classified ads, inserts, and all types of web ads can all be managed with the same tools.
The tools include single ad order forms, combined rate cards, and the ability to book and produce print ads that work for print and web interchangeably. Ad scheduling for the web includes the ability to place ads on demand as pages are viewed, to maximize ad views, and to overcome the limits of available ad screen space�something quite different from print ad scheduling. DTI’s single ad database can support scheduling and rating for both print (based on spacial rates) and the web (based on page views and click–thrus) yet serve one advertiser with unified booking and billing.
Adobe’s purchase of Macromedia has intriguing possibilities not only for DTI’s customers and potential customers. In the future, DTI will begin to integrate some of the web–savvy and Flash–based tools that Adobe has acquired, to enhance our customers’ ability to produce powerful advertising content for print, web, and handheld devices.
DTI also offers other complimentor applications to AdSpeed such as eMinder, mAdPad, and SpeedURL. eMinder allows you to set up different email templates that will automatically be sent out to customers notifying them that their ads are expiring or contracts need updating. It can be used to create many different types of notifications to remove the manual responsibility from your ad teams and to enhance your customer relationships.
AdPad is a powerful remote (laptop and Palm) application to enable your sales reps to create ad orders in the field. They can view customers, view ads and their status, and make changes or create new ad orders easily. This tool is nearing completion and will be an exciting addition to the AdSpeed suite.
SpeedURL is another incredibly powerful advertising tool you can implement. It gives you the ability to link ads in your printed products (both retail and classified) to their counterparts online and/or related information on the internet. Long and cumbersome URL links are converted to simple codes which are inserted in ads by designers. When readers see the codes in your print product, they simply go to your website and enter the code and are instantly redirected to the specific item they are interested in. No long multi–step searching for the customer, and no long URLs taking up space in your ads.
AdSpeed is a powerful application for designing ads and is one integral component to the larger Liquid Media advertsing solution from DTI. For more information on AdSpeed or any of its related technologies, contact your sales rep or email .
