Niche Media Launches End-to-End Ad Portal

SendMyAd service intended to simplify preflighting process.

By Joanna Pettas
04/23/2008

Niche Media—publisher of Gotham, Los Angeles Confidential and Vegas magazines—has signed on to a new service that allows advertisers to submit, approve and deliver ads and corresponding insertion order data to publishers through a standard Web browser, live and without the need to download software.

The ad portal, called SendMyAd, launched about a month ago. SendMyAd is a division of Blanchard Systems, and the service relies on Dalim’s Dialogue and Twist software.

Bond Web to Print Publishing, publisher of New School Report, also has signed on for the service.

According to Shawn Lowe, Niche Media’s director of manufacturing for digital imaging, SendMyAd replaces an ad portal that preflighted ad files but not in front of the advertiser. With the previous system, Niche “had to answer a lot of questions and had to pay for multiple uploads. It was taking too much time from our staff and confusing our advertisers,” Lowe said. Using SendMyAd, files can be uploaded to the new system which preflights the ads, identifies any existing errors and allows the person submitting the file to see the problem, fix it and make the approval.

In the future, Niche expects to be able to drop ads directly into its printer’s production system—also based on Dalim software—without intervention. “My staff will no longer have to go get a PDF from the ftp folder and place it into QuarkXPress or InDesign, distill it to a PDF/X-1A file and send it to our softproofing solution. We hope to be able to avoid these manual steps on thousands of ads within the next six months,” Lowe said. “Even though we have tripled our ad pages due to recent acquisitions, we will not have to add more than one or two people to our staff.”

According to FOLIO:’s 2007 Digital Publishing Survey, publishers’ use of ad portal systems declined from 25 percent in 2006 to 21 percent in 2007. The number of publishers, however, who expected ad portals to save $200,000 their businesses $200,000 or more per year rose from 6 to 10 percent. Sixteen percent of respondents indicated they would start using ad portals within three years or more, up from 12 percent in 2007.