Atex Offers Mediawide's Publishnow Self-Service Ad-Production Tool

Atex, Reading, England, reached agreements with India's Mediawide for its Publishnow self-service ad-production tool and with Austrian Press Agency subsidiary APA-IT, which will offer the Atex Polopoly Web content management system.

The partnership with Mediawide adds self-service to the Atex Advertising product suite, helping customers cut costs with a Web-based solution for print and online display ads. Media companies get a fully branded solution that allows advertisers to control a display ad's entire life cycle, from scheduling and production to order placement, approvals and payment. Advertisers can access the self-service solution from any device with an Internet connection and complete an ad in as few as three steps.

In addition to enabling sales staffs to create complex ads directly with clients, Publishnow combines workflows for call centers, sales and production departments, decreasing the number of interactions needed to book and build ads, and thereby helping reduce labor costs, eliminate errors, and extend deadlines for advertisers.

Formerly Sansui Software, privately held Mediawide develops Web-to-print solutions that simplify customization, localization and adaptation of promotional materials, including published ads, inserts, signage and catalogs. Headquartered in Pune, India, Mediawide operates a North American subsidiary in Piscataway, N.J.

Atex offers Polopoly as "a comprehensive multimedia offering for APA-IT. Its support of multiple editorial workflows will allow APA-IT customers to streamline the digital publishing process and perform more real-time updates of breaking news stories, according to Atex.

Already serving large German-language publishers, Polopoly supports multi-site environments where news portals need to be created on the fly while supporting high traffic volumes. At Süddeutsche Zeitung, the CMS integrates with a print editorial system for converged workflows, allowing editors to create a piece of content once and publish it to all print, digital, mobile or tablet devices.

APA-IT Informations Technologie's IT solutions focus on media solutions and IT outsourcing. It operates the infrastructure of the Austrian news agency and numerous other media firms.