Nottingham Goes Live with Wave2 Apollo

February 11th 2005 - The Nottingham Evening Post has gone live with a new advertising feature, "Cars in Colour." The software at the heart of this initiative represents the first real-life application of Wave2's new Apollo product. IPA Systems Limited sold the system on behalf of Wave2 Media Solutions Limited - the company founded by Chris Hodges to produce a new generation of workflow and content management software - has created Apollo to automate the process of making-up newspaper advertisements.

The Apollo software has given the Nottingham Evening Post the opportunity to produce what it believes is the first automated web-based business-to-business newspaper advertising application in the country. Copy is entered directly by the customer and there is no further human interface throughout the rest of the process.

"We have just successfully launched the new "Cars in Colour" pages, within our Motoring Post supplement, to provide dealers with what we describe as a "virtual forecourt" within which to present their finest vehicles for sale," said Kerrel Wills, Technical & Operations Director at the Evening Post.

"In real terms it means a highly presentable newspaper-based advertising feature which offers dealers significantly later deadlines. Because of the high level of automation, ads may now be added into the system until 12:00 midday on Thursday for the following day's publication - an improvement of over two days on the manual system for this type of advertising. This means an opportunity for car dealers to put their latest vehicles in the "shop window" at very short notice."

Wave2 have integrated Apollo with a custom web-based user interface that has been created to the Evening Post's specification by local company Proweb. This website is also hosted by ProWeb. The website deals with the basic order taking information: capturing text, which is also run through a profanity checker; uploading and setting the size and resolution of the colour photograph; and defining the category for the advert. This also links in with the Evening Post's existing Sentinel system which handles the billing side of the transaction and books the space within the page. Copy is typed into a visual layout of the ad to give an impression of how the final version will look. The copy, the photograph, the invoice, and the space allocation are all linked together through the use of a unique reference number.

The raw data, in XML format is then fed into Apollo, which uses it's rules engine, governed by a series of configurable rules and styles, to create the final advertisement. Apollo automatically collects and converts the JPG image of the vehicles, processing them for print before placing them in the Ads. Apollo then creates a PDF of each ad which is made available to the Evening Post's Pongrass and Miles page layout software for final positioning on the page. A further planned development of the Nottingham system would see Apollo further integrated with the website. This would provide for immediate feedback through the web page to the customer, as the actual ad is created.

"What this system means from an operational view point is that the ad reaches the final page layout without any human intervention whatsoever," said Kerrel Wills. "From the time the customer enters his required text and hits the send button everything is automated. This means the feature is very cost effective for us to produce because we don't need to spend time creating each individual display advertisement.

"The first reaction of many people is that software cannot possibly create an aesthetically pleasing advert - but in fact these pages look significantly better than those made-up manually with individually created ads," he added.

Commenting on the implementation, Wave2 founder and managing director Chris Hodges said, "We were delighted that the Apollo software required very little adjustment to handle this specific task. Although there was work involved to integrate our software with the ProWeb user-interface, and with the Sentinal system, the actual rules engine delivered just what was required without additional programming. The results produced by Nottingham are excellent, and we firmly believe that we are seeing the start of a revolution in the way that ads and pages are created, both here at Nottingham and in the industry in general."

Kerrel Wills and his team at the Nottingham Evening Post are already working on other areas where the use of Wave2's Apollo software could provide benefits with its ability to automatically create display advertisements. They consider that possibly up to 40 per cent of Display Ad production could benefit by automation.

The foundation of all of Wave2 software products is the Wave2 Publishing Platform. This is a powerful rules engine that allows for the automated creation and building of documents. The resultant documents can be produced for either electronic or printed delivery. The company has, to date, developed three products based on the Wave2 Publishing Platform.

For more information please contact: sales@ipasystems.co.uk

TOP