By: E&P Staff The Dallas Morning News has gone live on a 463-seat Atex AdBase advertising and business system, selected for its ability to integrate all aspects of the ad sales, from order entry and placement to financial tracking and reporting. It also handles all invoicing and accounts receivable for print and digital advertising.
With AdBase, The Morning News reduces the number of internal advertising systems from four to one, which will cut operational expenses by about half while increasing overall efficiency and sales capabilities. AdBase is the foundation for the paper's Integrated Advertising System, an initiative designed to refocus sales and marketing to enhance customer service.
"Our goal is to better understand our clients' marketing objectives and develop recommendations that reach their target audiences and deliver results," Fran Wills, Morning News Senior Vice President of Marketing and Interactive Fran Wills said in a statement.
The most immediate benefit is the integration AdBase provides. Rather than access disparate systems for account information concerning credit history, ad renewals, financial reports and statistics, the staff can use Atex's single database to quickly respond to clients.
A four-month internal marketing campaign before the launch aimed to build support and increase awareness of system benefits among News staffers.
"We probably had well over a hundred people here during the weekend making sure the ads were all formatted correctly," Jim Hesson, director of technology for sales and marketing at News parent A.H. Belo Corp., said in a statement. "It was exhausting, but we were able to switch on the pagination and boom, we were there. Go live was basically a none-event."
Belo will implement IAS and AdBase across all its newspapers in the next two years -- from The Providence (R.I.) Journal to The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Calif. -- to create a common database across all newspapers, giving executives a single look across all their businesses.
IAS and AdBase will provide common features for all its publications, giving a standard look and feel that will make booking ads easier for customers. In the future, Belo hopes that with AdBase Internet functionalities integrated into all its titles, advertisers will have a common self-service portal to book ads across properties, which will be capable of reaching a national audience online and in print.
The Morning News already is seeing benefits for staffers. The user-friendly interface and standard operating platform offer more reliability and features to improve functionality, and www.dallasnews.com) can provide a self-service portal for customers to place, style, price, schedule, and review classified and retail ads. Ads booked at www.placeads.dallas.com can be placed on the Web site, in the print edition or both.
According to Atex, the only customization required during AdBase implementation in Dallas consisted of third-party interfaces that had to be tuned and configured.
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