Over the past five years, publishers have adopted web-based portals for the collection, validation and processing of incoming ad materials. By adopting ad portals, publishers have gained the benefit of automating the process of receiving, validating and placing ads in their print publications, reducing their costs and time expenditures.
Typically publisher’s ad portals require the ad materials supplier to manually enter data into the job ticketing component of the site and then upload the ad file. Because a manual process is required on the sending end, agencies do not enjoy the cost reduction benefits in the supply chain that publishers do. Agencies are constantly trying to find ways that they, too, might achieve benefits of using ad portals to deliver materials to the publisher by automating their processes.
The barrier to achieving automation on the ad delivery side is that as of yet, there are no standards or specifications in place to foster automatic connections between the agencies production systems and the publishers’ portals. The all-digital workflow stops dead at the agency's fulfillment operator who must manually move the insertion data from their production systems into the portal and then upload ads. A standard interface between portals needs to be defined so any sending system can directly communicate with any receiving system.
Adopting the use GWG ad tickets by both the materials supplier and the publisher would go a long way toward fostering end-to-end automation. But after more than 10 years, publishers in North America have yet to be able to agree on which metadata fields can be universally required by all publishers and on what to call those fields. Although some publishers have adopted the GWG ad ticket, others have not. There are nomenclature issues in addition to regional business issues which have precluded reaching an agreement.
The ADAM Working group of the IDEAlliance Digital Ad Lab Initiative was formed to foster the same type of production process automation by agencies that publishers have individually achieved with their ad portals. To accomplish this goal, publishers must come together to agree on a standard set of required fields that they all can agree upon.
The ADAM Specification has been finalized is now available for use.
