Automating advertising workflows can help news/magazine publishers save both time and money – maximising profitability and efficiency in a challenging media landscape – but many are still stuck in a culture of doing things manually.
In the face of declining readerships and a squeeze on ad revenues, publishers big and small often face a stark choice: cut costs or stop publishing altogether. Automating tasks is one way for publishers to make savings, while continuing to publish.
Mike Hoy, managing director and co-owner of Papermule, which offers automated workflow solutions for publishers, describes it as “intelligent plumbing”. But Hoy says office cultures relying on emails, phone calls, and even post-it notes, still persist in news publishing.
Papermule, founded in 2003, works with the likes of Telegraph Media Group, Bauer Media, and journal publishers Springer Nature. Its AdDesk solution streamlines ad workflows by automatically matching upstream actions (sales) with downstream results (content). The software sits behind any sales platform and aims to cut out manual human tasks.
“We can’t do without people, but we can take 1,000 little jobs away from somebody,” says Hoy, who likens it to the change in supermarkets from manned tills to self-checkouts.
He answered Press Gazette’s questions about the benefit of workflow automation to news/magazine publishers, how to make a profit with self-serve ads, the major challenges facing the news industry and the future of print.
What is the biggest challenge facing publishers today?
“Declining readership and the squeeze on ad revenues. And the inability to monetise the digital equivalents – what people have sold in print for lots of money, they’re not selling online for the same sort of revenues. That’s a challenge.
“We believe print has a long-term place in the world, but it’s not going to survive as it is today – and I think a lot of publishers are coming to the same conclusion. Print products will be a premium product, and so will have a very interesting demographic to advertise to. The question is: how do we ensure that it remains profitable? For us that means streamlining processes, automation, cutting costs, reducing errors, and making it a very repeatable, cost-efficient process to still do.
“That’s where our AdDesk solution comes in. We want to make sure that as few fingerprints are left on things as possible. Our view is, if you’ve had to take a PDF out of an email and put it on a file server and name it then you’re doing it wrong. Because although that exercise seems fairly innocuous it’s, one, been done by a human, who is fallible, and, two, taken 30 seconds to a minute to do, which it didn’t need to – it should have just happened.”
What is Papermule’s offer to publishers?
“Intelligent plumbing. Trying to get people out of the way, trying to get email boxes out of the way. Anywhere where there is a human involved in trying to move content around, or put it in a folder, or name it correctly, is fraught with errors. And it’s time consuming and not a particularly fulfilling job. People are better used with more skilled and creative things. We can’t do without people, but we can take 1,000 little jobs away from somebody.
“As opposed to boosting ad revenue, if you like, we’re trying to reduce the production costs. If you sell a piece of advertising for £500 and spend £600 producing it, you really shouldn’t have done it. So if you can ensure that your production costs are well below your sale cost, then at least you’re running in a profitable way.”
What does advertising workflow automation look like?
“It’s the ability for somebody to change something in one platform and have that information reflected downstream. The simplest example is if sales kill an ad for some reason, whether it’s digital or print. How do you stop that content being published? How do you tell all the downstream platforms, as soon as you possibly can, that that content is now not to go? You can’t be relying on people to spot it, find the right reference number, go to Google, look at the previews to find the one it’s related to, and so on.
“Automation means that when files arrive at the downstream platform, they are named correctly and consistently every time. Nobody types it wrong. Everybody knows whether the content is in or not. Everybody can see a preview of it. It’s all in one place. So it’s not a single magic bullet to solve a problem, but it’s going to polish everything.”
What makes Papermule different from other solution?
“I think there’s quite a lot of products out there that are sold as a workflow solution – think about pre-flight engine PDF – but our view is that it’s a workflow enabled unit. It’s one of many little blocks that makes up your overall workflow. It does one chunk of it. It has an input and an output. What we need to do is plumb maybe half a dozen or a dozen of these together so that overall you have one solution that is entirely automated.
“We often end up drawing diagrams on whiteboards in the workshops we do with customers – system X goes to system Y, and then we draw stick men, because from system Y to system Z somebody has to get involved and there’s a human process. Why is it there? What is a human doing that we can’t do automatically? Why has somebody had to send an email, why didn’t that email get sent automatically?
“One of the phrases we quite often talk about is event-driven workflows. By simply doing something, something else should happen. It’s those events that trigger all the other actions downstream that need to be appropriately applied at that point in time. Within moments, it should all be on the same page.”
What is the biggest workflow problem publishers face?
“It’s manual tasks – and it’s often the most insignificant manual tasks.
“We have a module of AdDesk that integrates with Google Ad Manager. Probably the biggest user of that we’ve got is Springer Nature… one of the biggest journal publishers in the world.
“We look after all of their digital integration to Google. So once something’s booked on their sales platform, it’s how that order and line item is created in Google and how the content is collected and submitted to Google. Bluntly it’s about removing clicks.
“We did a flow diagram and worked out it was something like 56 clicks through Google to supply the content, which is bonkers. We got it down to eight or nine clicks.”
What’s the biggest barrier to change you see within publishing?
“We did a project once where the sales team used to write on post-it notes and put them on somebody’s desk. It was a cultural thing. A people thing. That’s quite often the hardest thing when you do these projects – it’s not the technology, it’s changing people’s perception and trying to persuade them that they’re not doing it the right way anymore. It might have been good 20 years ago, but maybe you shouldn’t still be doing it that way.
“Some ten years ago now we put a platform into the Irish News. The IT director just really wasn’t for the project and didn’t really get it, but about six months after we went live, we sat down and he said ‘I get it’. He said: ‘You’re not doing one big thing to improve things, you’re doing 1,000 little things. You’re saving five seconds here and there, all over the place for a dozen people.”
How can publishers profit from self-serve advertising?
“Our media sits behind the sales platform, so doesn’t actually sell the advertising space, but it allows people to submit either finished advertising content or components for makeup. So you can build up a Facebook carousel ad, for example, by uploading the content. It allows you to crop and scale your images on submission, provide your headlines, your banners, your links.
“What it means from a publisher’s perspective is that they get a package that clearly defines what it is that the advertiser wants to put in, as opposed to an email that’s a bit loose and woolly with some attachments that might or might not be what the customer wants to use. So it’s the ability to drive a templated request form, for want of a better description.
“It’s not about bringing classified revenue back, it’s about clinging on to what’s there and making sure it’s as streamlined and as profitable as it can be.”
What publishers are using self-serve advertising?
“The Telegraph make a seven-digit number out of [reader] announcements every year. They’re not cheap, and there’s a certain clientele that advertise or like to put their announcements in the Telegraph. It’s revenue they don’t want to lose, but we needed to streamline for them.
“They had a platform in place, but the problem with lots of these platforms is they don’t get maintained, and then suddenly you’re falling foul of GDPR or security issues. We replaced it with our own platform nearly three years ago. Instead of having two or three people taking telephone orders and typing it in, [the client] books and pays for it online themselves.
“The Telegraph has a very high editorial standard for their announcements. They’ve got a team of three behind this that check and sub them, but as soon as they’re subbed they’re on the page and printed – there’s very little manual input other than that.
“At Bauer Media we run our AdPortal, which takes a mixture of finished ad content and digital media content to build digital ads, for its Classic Car magazine. (AdPortal is an aspect of AdDesk specifically for ad submission.) It almost views these ads as editorial content. It’s free to advertise, but the magazine is bought by many of the readers purely because there’s a selection of vintage cars for sale and you get a feel for what the current prices are for your Austin Healey, for example.
“Where before they were taking 6×4 prints of pictures and a postcard with the text on, we’ve pushed that back out to the supply chain so that actually the readers type in the text and upload the image. All Bauer’s got to do is proofread it and check it’s legal, decent and honest, then put it on a page and print it… and there’s eight pages of content for the magazine.”
Visit Papermule to inquire about their workflow automation solutions.
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