---

MetaAdBoss™ is a business intelligence system for newspaper products. Publishers and advertising directors can use it to analyze how their products are designed. Creative services staff can use it to profile advertising sources. Layout designers can query it to improve ad placement.

The MetaAdBoss data warehouse contains the collection of edition designs that are sent for each product from the ad dummying system (Layout-8000, etc.) to the pagination system (InDesign®, QuarkXPress®, etc.). Most Layout-8000 users will have years’ worth of relevant data available for trend analysis upon installation of MetaAdBoss. MetaAdBoss has built in query and reporting facilities. Senior managers will enjoy making charts and graphs to spot trends. Selecting and sending data to spreadsheets for further analysis is as easy as clicking an icon. You will be able to easily analyze many publication trends based on the ultimate data source of your product design. For Layout staff, MetaAdBoss provides valuable assistance. Find out where advertisers ran in the paper. Use this information to guide current ad placement. Many of the ways you might use this information are provided as automated tools.

A great deal of information is generated each time a publication is designed. Whatever you might want to know about the product such as the number of pages, the amount of advertising space compared to editorial space or the number of paid ads can be easily retrieved from this data.

Perhaps at your newspaper this information is printed on one or more reports and then set aside, never to be looked at again. What if this information weren’t set aside and lost, but instead saved in a central location where it could be easily accessed?

MetaAdBoss is that central location for storing the data.

How does today’s paper compare to last year or even last week? Is the number of color ads going up or down over the course of a month? Is the newshole percentage consistent over time or does it fluctuate based on the day of the week? MetaAdBoss provides a number of reporting tools that make it possible to not only ask these questions but to quickly produce the answers.

Make reports with MetaAdBoss’s ad hoc report builder; filter tabular data to view product information; chart and graph the filtered data; recreate the actual dummy used to layout a product when it was first published.

Use the historical information to help place ads tomorrow. By examining where ads were placed in the past, MetaAdBoss can make suggestions on where new ads should be placed in the future. Add custom rules for each advertiser to further refine the position requests. Use the knowledge of what an advertiser runs to explore new upsell opportunities and reach new levels of customer satisfaction.

Interfacing with Layout-8000™

After a product is dummied in Layout-8000, the information about that product is exported into a file called “OUTEXT”. The OUTEXT file contains information about every ad, block, filler, page and zone that were part of the product. MetaAdBoss gathers this information and creates a data warehouse. Layout-8000 views one product at a time. MetaAdBoss combines all Layout-8000 data over time.

As ads are sent to Layout-8000, they can be checked by MetaAdBoss against the advertisers’ past preferences to determine if the ads are scheduled with the correct position requests. The position requests could then be automatically corrected or resolution can be left in the hands of the Layout-8000 user following notification of any discrepancies.

As each ad is received by Layout-8000, MetaAdBoss is called to check the position request against several models.

Customer Rules can be created to override the historical trends of an advertiser or to provide position information for new advertisers. If this is the second or subsequent time an ad has run, information from the previous runs can be used to determine where the ad should be placed next. If this advertiser has run an ad for this product before, MetaAdBoss will suggest an Ad Type (e.g., tires, banks, etc.) and a Group Placement (e.g., sports, main news, etc.) request based on the advertiser’s history. Group requests and types allow Layout-8000 to more accurately place ads, keeping competitors apart and satisfying position requests. This is especially important if your order entry system does not support either Group or Type requests.

Use with AdMAX™

While SCS’s advertising order entry system, AdMAX, does not send information directly to MetaAdBoss, AdMAX can use the information maintained in MetaAdBoss to improve the order entry process. When an order is being placed for an advertiser, AdMAX can query MetaAdBoss to determine where other ads for that advertiser have been placed in the past.


Click here to contact SCS for additional product information.