Adinfinitum Delivers for Buffalo News

Buffalo, NY, February 1, 2006

It took time, patience, and ultimately an accepting sales force for the Buffalo News to reap the rewards and benefits from adinfinitum, Presteligence’s electronic tearsheet and invoice delivery system. Known to the Buffalo News Staff as E-Tearsheet Server—adinfinitum has evolved the daily routines of not only their advertisers, but also their sales force, creative services, prepress, and editorial marketing departments.

With a daily circulation of over 201,000, The Buffalo News starts its 4th full year of archived tearsheets in 2006. They opted to buy the system outright--storing all of their data on their own servers. As forerunners of electronic tearsheet installations, the production manager and billing department saw the benefits for the advertiser and the newspaper’s cash flow. The advantages to both of these parties are abundantly clear—faster availability to tearsheets, one-window tearsheet and invoice reconciliation; in turn, increased cash flow for the newspaper.

Throughout the subsequent years, there were individual users of the system but the hard push didn’t come until early 2005. With new sales faces, John Bleckinger, Advertising Operations Supervisor, held training seminars to situate the project in the sales force’s hands. Sales managers created a friendly contest between reps to sign up as many advertisers as possible to jump start the service. This concept, along with implementing e-tears for all new advertisers, proved successful. Buffalo’s user access reaches almost 200 advertisers. Access continues to increase an average of 10 new sign-ups per month. John says, “As Administrator I hear 99.9% positive responses from advertisers. Some of these advertisers are using the tearsheets for multiple purposes including flyers for their business…sending paper tearsheets is becoming the exception, not the rule.” As of October 2005, Buffalo News has discontinued paper tearsheets for all users of adinfinitum. Jim Stewart, General Manager of Towne Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep, uses adinfinitum for co-op ad submission. “I like the fact that at the end of the month, I can quickly pull the co-op ads, rather than shuffling through all the papers.” Jim has had no problems with acceptance from his manufacturers.

As opposed to the hours or even days of wait time for hard copy tearsheets that are required with all ‘pick-up’ ad orders, sales reps can immediately pull the e-tearsheet to continue processing a client’s order. “I used to have to fill out tearsheet requests forms for each individual ad,” says Janet Sherman, National Classified Advertising Account Representative, “If I missed one, then the agency calls and I have to manually search through stacks of old papers…a missing tearsheet is all it takes to hold up payment which causes credit issues.” As a result, fewer sales assistants are needed and less time is spent pulling paper tearsheets by the prepress department.

The search and browse functionalities of adinfinitum allow the editorial marketing department to pull up the actual printed piece, something their editorial archival system does not have. They are able to find information from prior publications much faster and with more information than paper tearsheets include. Adinfinitum includes as much metadata or ad information as the newspaper can supply from their front end systems.

As adinfinitum takes off, the boundaries remain limitless. John sums up the future, “What is interesting about this product is that there are some obvious uses and drivers that push this technology forward, but when multiple departments and advertisers start using it, you find more and more uses for it inside the building and out.” Time will tell what other benefits adinfinitum will bring to the Buffalo News. For now, they continue the push.

About Presteligence:
Presteligence is a global software company with 30 years experience of providing solutions in the newspaper industry. Presteligence, Inc. develops cutting-edge software products and services for newspapers and associated industries, including advertising services, production workflow, color calibrated proofing, ink presetting and other innovative technologies.

For more information, contact Denise Oates, doates@presteligence.com

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