Roy Leamon describes his publication as a “particularly large
regional magazine,” which, given that the region is Texas, and the
magazine, Texas Monthly, attracts national sponsorship and attention,
almost qualifies as an understatement—something you don’t hear too often
in the Lone Star State.
“Still, Texas Monthly faces challenges that, say, large consumer
magazines probably don’t.” The magazine may be known for award-winning
journalism and beautiful photography, but its base of advertisers runs
the gamut from New York ad agency clients to small-town mom and pop
stores, some of whom have advertised with the magazine for years.
Leamon, vice president of production and technology, must balance the
needs of this range of current clients while positioning the magazine
for the future.
Key to this effort was the implementation of the SendMyAd ad portal,
which allows advertisers to upload an ad directly to the cloud based
solution. Ads are automatically preflighted providing immediate feedback
on the condition of the ad. Many problems can be fixed in the portal
with tools like the trim tool to reposition and eliminate unwanted
borders and slug information. All of this makes for quick, hassle-free
corrections and approval.
“It’s important the portal allows anybody with any level of
technological sophistication to be able to use it, and for the most part
it appears the advertisers who use it really like it,” Leamon says.
The magazine is open ended about how it accepts ads, Leamon says,
allowing long-time clients who prefer other submission channels to keep
using them while encouraging advertisers to switch to the portal. The
magazine has seen a steady increase in the number of advertisers using
SendMyAd.
“We received ads
from a variety of sources, both e-mail and ftp sites, and we have an
upload page on our website, but none of those provides any kind of
front-end flight checking for problems in the ad file itself or for size
correction,” Leamon says. “Before offering SendMyAd, we probably had at
least 30 to 40 percent of the ads we get every month would require us
to fix something in the ad or to contact that advertiser or the agency
or the designer in order to get an ad corrected.”
As every publisher knows, this can take time—usually a day or two to
get problems ironed out, and sometimes longer. “It’s remarkable how
often designers leave town when you need to make a revision on an ad,” Leamon says.
This is why SendMyAd has proven to be a tremendous time saver. “Any
kind of reduction of workload during deadline week is significant,” he
says. “It helps reduce the number of ads that either would have problems
or simply have to be trafficked, and sometimes, especially in heavy
months, that can make a big difference in how your deadline goes.”
Advertisers, he says, “appreciate the ease of use of the portal and
have understood that it is ultimately going to be helpful to them,
because it assures them ahead of time they are in good shape with their
ad.”
It also dovetails well with Texas Monthly’s plans for future growth.
Leamon says his decision to use SendMyAd was reinforced by the
application’s support for Web and mobile ads, as well as the ability to
create templated (or formatted) ads through the cloud-based tool, Ad
Creator. He expects both capabilities to play a role as the publication
adopts new production efficiencies and monetization strategies.
“Ad Creator will offer the ability for an advertiser to upload some
copy, a logo and a photo into a layout, the system builds the ad, and
then supplies us a final pdf rather than our having to build those
formatted ads by hand,” he says. “We see this as one of the ways
SendMyAd can grow with us.”
Near term, Leamon says, SendMyAd has allowed Texas Monthly to be more
productive with a small staff. “And we’d like to explore more of the
options SendMyAd offers down the road,” he notes, “especially as
magazine production staffs have to be increasingly productive on a
per-person basis, because hiring more staff is not an option.”
“We think we do a good job and our readers seem to think so too,” he
adds. “We are constantly looking for anything that will help us be more
efficient and produce the same high quality magazine that we have been
producing all these years, so SendMyAd was something that really seemed
compelling to us as a mechanism by which advertisers could take a little
bit more responsibility for making sure their ads were OK, and getting
them correct before they sent them to us. And it certainly has proven to
be that.”
