CREATE AN AD: EASY AS ONE, TWO, CLICK

By: Mark Fitzgerald Do-It-Yourself Plans For Advertisers Make Debut



In a service economy that has customers pump their own gas, do their
banking at machines, and clean up their own tables at McDonald's, it
was probably inevitable that newspapers would start asking advertisers
to create their own ads.



At the recent Nexpo in San Francisco, several companies unveiled Web-

based services that allow papers to make just that demand. Besides
asking advertisers to do the traditional work of salespeople and
telephone ad takers, the services have two things in common: They use
the ubiquitous Internet to replace the expense and technological hassle
of the previous generation of direct computer or ISDN links between a
paper and advertisers, and they permit ads to go immediately into both
a paper's print and Web products. Papers are betting that, aided by
these new services, advertisers will find automated ad creation as
convenient as self-serve gas, automated teller machines, and fast food.



'We're no longer asking the sales rep to do the ads,' said Lars Jiborn,
project director at software developer Mactive. 'We're asking the
customer to do the ads for us, and, of course, they don't know the
rules we have for creating an ad. What WebBase does is give them the
rules for order entry.'



Melbourne, Fla.-based Mactive is shooting for a fall release of its
automated ad taker, WebBase Internet Advertising System. Classified or
display advertisers are guided by a series of ad fields, which take
information and create an ad automatically. Someone selling a car, for
instance, may be prompted to include not only the price, year, and make
of the automobile but also such venerable phrases as 'runs good,' 'must
see,' and 'clean.' The suggested ad can then be further tweaked by
customers.



AdLizard, from North Sydney, Australia-based Lizard Research Pty Ltd.,
is already used by The Sydney Morning Herald and the dozens of
Fairfax Group papers in Australia. It made its North American debut at
Nexpo. 'With AdLizard, advertisers don't need any special software;
they don't need ISDN or T1 lines - just a PC, an Internet
connection, and a modem,' said Lizard Research executive Amanda Janker.
'To the advertiser, in fact, this will appear to be a free service.'



AdLizard uses Adobe InDesign to create templates that allow advertisers
to produce classified or display ads using a point-and-click graphical
user interface (GUI). Because the ads can include photos, the time-

consuming job of compiling real estate ads with numerous shots of
houses is performed by a real-estate agent rather than a newspaper
employee.



Another Australian company, Pongrass Newspaper Systems, is promising an
Internet ad-entry product by the fall. At Nexpo, Pongrass released
version 5 of its ad-entry software suite. The biggest change newspapers
will note is replacement of the GUI with a more text-based version.



'Everybody out there went to the GUI interface, but at the end of the
day, the newspaper people said to us, 'Hey, we liked the old way,''
said Senior Systems Engineer Elizabeth Hely-Hammond. 'They said, 'We
want to take as many ads as possible, and do it like we used to -
just click, click, click.''



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Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is editor at

large for E&P.









(c) Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher