CCI Contracts in North America, Southeast Asia

By: E&P Staff Singapore Press Holdings contracted with CCI Europe for an advertising system at The Straits Times, the country's largest newspaper in English, and its 12 Chinese and Malay publications.

Singapore Press Holdings aimed to bring together in one system its English and Chinese classified bookings to enable better booking management and cross selling. CCI AdDesk Sales will provide a "centralized view of the customer that would facilitate better selling, management, prospecting and up-selling," said SPH Senior Vice President of Classified Elsie Chua.

SPH also sought an integrated back-end system that allowed other ad-booking channels such as the Internet, and one more proficient at invoicing, rate adjustment, client profiling, and contract management. "A new functionality we want in this system is an easy and flexible way to set up and monitor ad-hoc creative sales promotions and packages. This will allow us to track sales results with greater efficiency," Chua said in a statement announcing the sale.

In addition to newspaper and magazine publishing, SPH provides Internet portal services with online news and e-commerce facilities, operates two radio stations under a joint venture company, holds stakes in a mobile telecom service provider, and has expanded into commercial property development.

Earlier, In accordance with last year's master agreement between CCI Europe and Tribune Publishing, CCI and Neasi-Weber International (NWI) announced that Tribune Publishing bought the infrastructure for a standardized AdDesk Sales System, which will be deployed across the group's 11 dailies, beginning at the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel. Agreements for implementation at the other sites will follow.

"Implementing a common system across all sites provides an opportunity to standardize our business and IT processes and create a 'best practice' solution throughout the entire group," said Darko Dejanovic, Tribune Co. vice president and chief technology officer.

CCI AdDesk Sales will enable Tribune Publishing to replace existing advertising systems with a single order-entry solution for classified, retail advertising, and accounts receivable at each site. The system will also provide an integrated Web order-entry application.

The Chicago Tribune was the first to buy the complete system. CCI said AdDesk Sales will improve ad work flow and reporting capacity and reduce call times and error rates.

"The new Web Order Entry (WOE) interface and the ability to report and sell across markets are improvements to the technological infrastructure that we have today," said Frank Stawicki, Chicago Tribune Technology technical development project manager.

Through a new and improved, user-friendly and a number of integrations in the back-end, it will be the users of the CCI System that stand to benefit the most.

The front end's more-intuitive graphical user interface facilitates training and proficiency, and back-end business process restructuring, which will be extended across the group, increases system efficiency and provides a more powerful infrastructure for future challenges, according to CCI.