Adpoint developer Integration-X has added facilities to allow users to process all ad files - digital as well as print - through the same workflow.
With digital and mobile ads now accounting for an increasing part of newspaper revenues, the upgrade takes over the tasks of material chasing, quality control and proofing material for sometimes-tricky digital ads.
Different in file format, publication and the way they behave, digital ads have been a source of stress for those using file-based ad tracking, but a new interface enables Adpoint users to handle them as smoothly as PDF/X files. The same milestones apply - from upload through preflight, proofing, approval and file conversion - as the system monitors each step, addressing the different challenges of digital ads. Complex multi-file ads are kept together and displayed as a website visitor would see them.
The system also monitors CPU load to ensure an ad does not drain the computing power of the device rendering it, checks streamed video loads 'politely' and verifies for click tags and malicious code, revealing sound and listing embedded URLs.
Nor do you have to be in the office to know what's going on: Adpoint now runs in HTML5 on tablets - with features including freetext searches, filters, sorting, asset-relations, pick-ups and proofs - and even smartphones, where proofing and sign-offs are possible 'on the go'.
Ongoing development and features such as 'upstream' preflighting have already won friends for Adpoint, which has scored a number of notable installs lately.
Among these are two Netherlands publishers, Erdee Media Groep and high-profile daily and online publisher Telegraaf Media, which will use Adpoint as a fully-managed cloud solution integrated with their ad booking system to handle print and digital ad materials for national and regional newspapers and websites.
Sales manager Jacob Salomonsen says the cloud implementation resulted in an exceptionally short time to go-live: "It's been a very efficient project, and the solution is very scaleable, up or down," he says.
Erdee Media in Apeldoorn is also the first customer for Planpoint, a fully integrated page planning and dummying solution with automatic placement of ROP and classified ads, as well as complete zone and section planning. Both are being integrated to the Zeno ad booking system there.
Elsewhere, reports from the Washington Post are of a huge impact internally with quantified benefits from taking the department fully paper free. FTE costs in processing 'camera ready' ads were halved, those in production creative reduced by 28 per cent, with "very positive" feedback on proofing and asset upload options.
