SPECTRUM 2001 CONFERENCE NOTES

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IDEAlliance Advertiser-Publisher Initiatives

Moderated By:

David Steinhardt
President
IDEAlliance

David announced that both PROSE XML, which was written with input from industry leaders such as Banta, RR Donnelley, Quad/Graphics, and Quebecor World, as well as SPACE XML, developed with the input of IDEAlliance, DDAP, NAA, and MPA members, are both complete and now available for public review and comment prior to publication. Both standards can be reviewed in whole by following the appropriate links from www.idealliance.org. Barbara Hanapole also announced that DDAP and IDEAlliance have agreed to collaborate on these and other advertiser-publisher initiatives such as UNADI, Digital Delivers, and the Advertisers Business Network.

Craig Shrader, President of Intersect Technologies, discussed these issues by first redefining workflow. According to Spectrum keynote speaker, Tim Sanders of Yahoo, a process is "an organized set of related activities that together deliver value as expected." This definition implies that there be both standards (organized) and industry coordination (related).

SPACE XML not only provides the conversion of SPACE from the old X12 EDI format, but also in-cludes space reservations, and will later include financial billing and invoicing and other media such as online advertising. SPACE XML will help to eliminated redundant human checking and double checking of business communications and instructions, and will also help minimize phone calls and faxing to double check everything. This double checking and the high rate of human error provide a lot potential savings… according to the Magazine Credit Association the industry is carrying $678,000,000 in past due accounts! The cost of catching and correcting an error increases as the error moves down the chain from media planning, to ordering, to production, and through to billing.

An 80-person industry committee developed SPACE/XML. UNADI is the Universal Advertising Digital Identifier. UNADI provides a unique identifier for ad or materials for any collaborative com-merce player who does business with many partners within our industry. The number includes fields for company name, city (code), client codes, date (month/year), revision codes and a unique identifier. The combination isn't just unique; it also provides the basis for account management, job tracking, and asset management. UNADI numbering system can be accessed via a public web page or via an API that de-velopers can use to embed UNADI numbering and usage into their own systems.

The Advertising Business Network (ABN) advocates a standardized industry workflow that synchro-nizes the trading partners of the supply chain. ABN is a business management and distribution process and strategy, not simply a product and service, which is supported by IDEAlliance, DDAP, NAA, and MPA. The ABN provides a minimal risk of investment in the technology or process by leveraging large-scale collaboration.

The ABN has several milestones coming up, and hopes to have a prototype demonstration with a group of volunteer companies done within six months. Five publishers, each contributing $135,000, will be selecting three advertising agencies and their support companies to participate. A couple of publishers have already signed up to do this prototype and get the ABN going, but publishers are encouraged to join now.

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