Masterclass interview by Michael Moon of James Kober, Newsday Corporation: how a multi-channel advertising operation uses Canto Cumulus to drive process innovations, cost savings, and faster cycle times

BACKGROUND

MM: We’re here with James Kober of Newsday. Let’s start off with a little bit of background, your current position, and a little bit of your career highlights.

JK: My name is James Kober, and my current job title at Newsday is prepress area manager.

I’ve been with the company almost 19 years. I went to Queens College in the City University of New York system. I was looking for a job right after school. I came to Newsday and I took an entry-level job.

I’ve been through various jobs from clerking in the ad layout department to actually honing my prepress skills and becoming an ad operator/imaging technician and an assistant supervisor. I’ve worked my way up to the point where I now am supervising 144 people.

I have all of Newsday’s prepress/ad layout folks from the front end—interactive or print—all the way up to output to plate. I also have the Newsday subsidiary, Star Publishing. They produce 183 weeklies.

So there’s a little bit about my background.

NEWSDAY MEDIA GROUP

MM: Would you give us a little bit of an overview of Newsday as an organization—the approximate size, number of employees, and information like that?

JK: The Newsday Media Group, as they now like to be known, now has about 2,200 employees. It started out in a garage, in Garden City—60-some odd years ago. I believe it was 1940. Newsday was founded by Alicia Patterson. Her father was involved with the Daily News.

Obviously, the last several years, there’s been a sea change in the newspaper industry. Folks are moving more and more toward the Web to get their news. People are very busy in their lives—finding less time to read the newspaper.

But the recent encouraging and exciting news is that Newsday was purchased by Cablevision—the sixth-largest cable operator in the country. That deal was closed approximately 3.5 months ago. Everyone here is hopeful that with Cablevision’s programming and advertising structure, we can cover all of our customers’ needs between print, online, and television.

So we’re excited about the future, and we’re just starting—with baby steps—to move into that area, right now.

MM: Could you describe a little more of what goes on in terms of ad operations—both in terms of the clients and the advertisers that you serve and the kinds of ads that your operations produce?

JK: We serve any and all advertisers. If we have a small business on Long Island and they need help building their ad, they don’t have to pay an agency. We certainly will do that for them. It’s part of the price of the ad. Then we’ll do campaigns and we’ll put together presentations for someone like Target—which we did last year.

We literally go from the small local retailers all the way up. We’ll do work for the national folks if they want us to get involved with helping them.

We have a full creative staff, and any creative needs of the company on the advertising side are handled by that group. Then we have a full production staff. So they’ll handle any of the production needs that arise when customers send in their digital files.

MM: You talked about how publishing in general and newspapers in particular continue to undergo significant structural changes to their business models and sources of revenue. Could you expand upon some of those changes and how digital technology continues to provide a platform for innovating and driving some of those changes or addressing some of those market forces?

JK: Sure. Historically, when we would work an ad that would appear in print, it would be very common to work the ad, make paper proofs, and have the sales rep—the account executive—swing by and pick up the proof to take out to the client.

Through digital technology, we have taken that to the next level. Using a system like Canto Cumulus, we can work through the ad and publish it. Then instead of us having to make paper proofs and have a sales rep swing by to pick that up and take it to the client, the sales assistant who’s in the building can log into the Cumulus system via a Web client. They can search on the client name and look at the proof themselves. From there, we can email it to the client or the account exec—whoever wants it.

MM: Vince, as the lead consultant on the project, would you give a quick survey of how this works?

VDP: First the graphic artist ingests the newly created ad into Cumulus. When they are ready to have the ad reviewed, they simply select the Publish to PDF option from a custom Moksa-created menu. This triggers a process that sends the ad through an approval process that first creates a PDF of the file and then publishes it to a Web catalog. An email is then generated by the system, addressed to appropriate sales and clients needing to approve the ad. The email contains a link that logs the user into the Web catalog, and places them right at the ad review screen. Here it can be approved or edit comments can be collected for modification requirements. If edits are necessary, the comments will be collected and forwarded to the graphic designer, together with a link to the original InDesign document, via email. This loop may continue until the ad is approved.

JK: The digital revolution has certainly streamlined the process and truly benefits our customers by getting them what they need faster, and giving them more time to make any necessary changes that they may need.

MM: Taking that a step further—let’s get away from print and talk about interactive and video for a moment. Everyone seems to be very excited about the potential for video. In the past, I guess you’d have to have a client come in to do the presentation or work hard to get an artist to go out and visit the client.

JK: We are shooting several videos. And we’re doing a bunch of Flash ads for the Newsday.com website. Again, we put those Flash ads and videos into the Cumulus digital asset management system and when a sales rep is out on the road visiting a client, they could use the Web browser to tap into the system. They could then download the video and show it right at the client’s place of business. Or they could show the Flash ad and say, “This is what your cube ad would look like on Newsday.com.” Very exciting thing!

I think it gives us an advantage over the competition.

MM: If I understand you right, James, many of these changes that you’ve described show that Newsday, in particular, and perhaps publishers in general, will become full-service marketing and creative agencies.

JK: Yes. I have found that to a significant and increasing degree.

MM: And that technology allows the agency function to exist as a node on the network. Depending upon where you have an account executive, you’ve now got the ability to deliver creative and production services without necessarily having a lot of bricks and mortor.

JK: Yes. I’d agree with that, Michael. I think that’s very valid.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to the creative and how happy the creative makes those clients. But certainly the technology and getting that creative to the client in a very timely fashion—with good interaction and good visuals—is certainly helping us tremendously.

MM: That gets to an underlying theme of what it takes to produce great creative. Oftentimes people operate under what I think of as a misconception: creative is some guy off in a corner with a ponytail and a Mac making up something that looks cool and in a flash of insight goes, “Ah! That’ll work!” Then, they storyboard something and off they go to the client and sell it.

More often than not, you start off with a germ of an idea that might become something. Then comes communication, collaboration, and interaction with a whole bunch of different people, including the quantitative side of the house that’s looking at analytics (customer demographics and trends like that) retail or Web site traffic reports with the questions of what kinds of people show up, where, and when.

Out of this kind of really rich “soup” of communication and interaction comes a creative product that reflects not only a good marketing focus, but also a way of really engaging very specific customer groups as influenced or directed by the retailer or brand marketer.

So communication and collaboration tend to be much more a part of great creative. It’s only exacerbated or multiplied by the question, “How do I get great creative into print and online?”

JK: Yes. I agree with everything you say, Michael. I think in the future, this will be taken to new levels of collaboration.

Using some of the Adobe tools and using Canto Cumulus as a DAM system, I’ve noticed that the collaboration—in my opinion—has gotten much better.

So think about it. You don’t have to take paper proofs of a concept or a storyboard to an advertising director or the AE. You might just shoot them a link that ties back to the Cumulus database and they’ll look for it themselves and annotate it themselves.

That type of collaboration is only going to become greater and greater as the tools get more sophisticated.

MM: My wife has a business in which she coaches solo practitioners and owners of small professional and business services. Specifically, she has really mastered the art of how to market yourself as a provider of personal or business services—from real estate brokers to life coaches to massage therapists. Her work makes it clear that many business people become paralyzed in terms of, “How do I really create engaging multimedia content that expresses my vision, values, what I offer that stands unique and valued?” This just goes to the fact that creating engaging multimedia content constitutes hard work and few have mastered it.

James, the mission for your creative service and production shop means that you think about how to improve the creativity of your group’s work in print,which is the core of your business, as well as the online and broadcast portions. Would you take us through some of the changes that you’ve encountered in the creative process, its tooling and, perhaps, the workflows of how to manage the multimedia dimension of most creative and production?

JK: Sure. Well, let’s take a step back 3.5 years ago. A creative services artist would do a special section for—let’s say—breast cancer awareness or some such item. It would be done in print, in a vacuum. It would be stored and backed up on CDs and put in a cabinet.

So the next year when someone was looking for it, you’d have to sort through all the CDs, think about who did it, and maybe you could find it in an hour because there were another 200 CDs in there, and they weren’t labeled properly, et cetera.

Fast-forward 3.5 years. Boy, a lot has happened!

Now when you’re doing that breast cancer awareness section in Adobe InDesign, I think we’re just starting to create this mindset where, as you’re doing the section for print, you’re thinking about, “How can I bring that section to life on the Web?”

“The components and the elements that I’m using in print—what else can I do online that can’t be expressed in print?”

For example—maybe there are some statistics on breast cancer awareness that tie back to a database. Maybe we incorporate videos in the interactive piece. So we’re using tools like Adobe InDesign and the Creative Suite to help us do that.

Up until a few months ago, you’d have to do that section in InDesign, and you pretty much had to think out of the box and start all over again in Flash. Now Adobe InDesign allows you to export the InDesign document to Flash, and take your work and make it come to life on the Web. We’re extremely excited about that.

The digital part of this is you’re working and creating, using these wonderful tools, and on the DAM side, it can go into a DAM like Cumulus where not only can the artist and their colleagues see it, and if the managing editor wants to see this and look at it from her desktop—to make suggestions? It’s all right there.

That’s an area where I told you it would take two hours to find a CD or a DVD from a couple of years ago. Now if you type in metadata that has “breast cancer awareness,” you’ll find the needle in the haystack in seconds, literally.

These are some of the things that we’re thinking about with taking that print content and repurposing it for Newsday.com.

MM: I’m sure that you’ve seen that in the process of thinking through, “How do we repurpose things,” many of those ideas or notions filter back into the actual creative process so you create multipurposed assets from the get-go, as opposed to trying to shoehorn a print asset into a Web space.

JK: Outstanding point. I believe that the messages and the way you grab people’s attention on the Web could be very different from print. I have to confess that I don’t come from a creative background—I come more from a production background.

But what the artists are telling me is that just the ability to take those elements from InDesign and port them into Flash…

But you’re right. The main point you were making, Michael—I agree with this. At the point of creativity and as they’re conceiving these ideas, they’re thinking about that at that time. At least this is our goal–that they think about that, at that time.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that many places have walls between the print folks and the interactive folks. We broke down those walls several years ago, and I made a bet on the future of DAMs and on the Adobe Creative Suite.

I told the company, “Let’s take those walls down,” because the artists will be able to repurpose their content for the Web. It’s all coming together now. This is the way. You’re exactly right. The artists are thinking about this at the time of creation.

MM: It seems to me that having a gallery of multimedia assets in front of a creative person stimulates all kinds of ideation—”what ifs” and “how abouts”—that almost train or install by example the need to create in a multimedia and multimodal communications and engagement context.

JK: The creative artists, in a way, you could say they had some of these galleries in the past—when you talk about stock art and about these various websites for purchased content. But now they have a whole new thing to look at.

They can look at the messages created by their colleagues by using Adobe Flash, and the points that are driven home, and the way those messages are composed. They can collaborate and be inspired much more easily than in the past, without DAM.

In the past, I guess you’d have had to walk over to that person’s computer and strike up a conversation to see what they were working on. Now it’s in front of their fingertips. They’re literally in the DAM all day long, putting their work there or retrieving it.

I think it is inspiration. They do view each others’ work much more often now.

MM: This calls attention to another core concept of creative support DAMs: optimization for creative workflows and work-in-process files—as opposed to repository and distribution DAMs optimized for central management and access-control functions.

In particular, DAMs that work well in creative and work-in-process workflows tend to have a pretty well-behaved Mac and PC native client by which to really do very fast, fluid drag and drop. Things like Apple scripting or other forms of scripting, so as to automate a lot of the oft-repeated activities and tasks associated with opening a file, resizing it and so on.

Could you take us through some of the finer points from a production/technology or workflow perspective—some of the finer points of the Canto Cumulus DAM solution?

JK: When you receive the Canto DAM, in the beginning it’s very overwhelming when you start to think about workflow and how you want to lay things out. But I learned a long time ago to get the creative folks involved from the beginning—to allow their input.

They can be a very demanding, intelligent group. They want the best. I feel partnering with Vince DiPaola and Moksa, we put some serious demands on the system. We built a workflow that they not only accepted, but they like much more than anything they’ve had in the past.

Part of that is because the Canto solution is a very visual solution. The Cumulus software works very well on the Macintosh. The collaboration we did with Vince DiPaolo—Vince comes from that background, and that helped a great deal.

We use the KISS method, Michael—Keep It Simple Stupid—but to create a sophisticated workflow.

So what do I mean by that? The artists populate a database themselves. They are responsible for entering the metadata. The artists know that the metadata they enter—in certain cases—is critical to the database and to all of their colleagues searching for that asset one week or five years from now.

Vince helped us come up with a solution to get that metadata associated with the assets very quickly. In essence, you drop an asset into a certain category. The metadata window pops up and you answer a few simple questions. That asset—again—is in the database forever. We don’t plan to purge it at all.

From there, we looked at all the different file formats that we had—whether video or Flash or InDesign. All the image types we have, Michael. Everything behaved fairly nicely. Then we had the curious challenge of, “How do we get all of the InDesign print documents and the Flash files and the videos to the sales assistants without overwhelming them with file types that they don’t need?” That’s where Moksa came in and we did custom coding and some advanced workflow automation.

We actually have a flag that the artists can change on a print document. It will take that document, and in the background, create a PDF and send it to the Web catalog for the sales associates.

PDF is a word that they understand and that they can show to a client when they have their laptop out in the field.

The solution I have found, with the right partner on the support side, can be a very scalable. It’s a system that you can mold and make what you want to make it.

When we started, I thought maybe it would just be a DAM. Now it’s turned into an actual workflow solution for us, as well. The artists are much, much happier with Canto and Cumulus than with anything we’ve had previously. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that they were involved, and that the Canto solution is a very visual solution.

On the 19^th of this month, Star Advertising will begin the process of migrating their current solution to Cumulus. This will entail a great deal of custom coding and XML migration from the content server.