News Release
October 2009

How Hachette Increased Production Efficiency by 30 Percent

Implemented SendMyAd portal, DALiM TWiST workflow; improved productivity.

By Jason Fell, Folio Magazine

10/07/2009
As part of a major effort to revamp its operations, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. decided to bring advertising management in-house and in March implemented the SendMyAd ad portal, supported by a DALiM TWiST workflow engine. Hachette rolled out the systems—integrated by digital prepress company Blanchard Systems—to advertisers in April. Since then, the publisher says it has realized a 30 percent increase in production efficiency.

“We were working with a number of other vendors to develop an ad portal that we were using internally for about a year, that we didn’t want to roll out until we knew which way the industry was going or cause confusion for our advertisers,” Michael Esposito, Hachette’s vice president of operations, told FOLIO:. “We saw that SendMyAd was really building market share and liked the features and thought it was easy to use.”

The systems allow Hachette to accept ads digitally online. SendMyAd delivers ads within Hachette’s required specifications while the DALiM TWiST production automation system serves as the workflow engine. Partial page ads are placed in an editorial page and converted to PDF X1/a files for final production.

“There’s less redundancy with this automation,” Esposito said. “We’re getting content into the company is a way that’s closer to our specs, which nearly eliminates the need to stop, go back, and return the content to the advertiser.

“Because productivity is up,” Esposito continued, “we’ve been able to lower headcount costs and support other departments in the company. Once you go totally digital you can select components to be sourced globally, which lowers costs and provides access to a 24-hour operation.”

Esposito said Hachette also is looking to expand the systems’ capabilities into areas like digital image tagging and ingestion, as well as classified advertising management. “There is a lot of room to expand the features to help other areas of business,” he said. “There are more ways to get content into our DAM in a more usable, quicker way. That’s the key.”

For more information, visit SendMyAd.com at www.sendmyad.com.