NEW NAA CLASSIFIED STANDARDS ARE A BIG STEP FOR PUBLISHERS

Competitive edge will be sharpened when ads can go across media

ORLANDO, Fla. – The audience barely reacted when Jack Stanley said, "It will change the way you do business."

Nonetheless, last week's announcement by the chairman of the Newspaper Association of America's Classified Advertising Standards Task Force that a method to readily exchange and publish classified advertising – irrespective of whether "publish" means putting ink on paper or voice to telephone or bits to on-line – had been agreed upon was a monumental event.

Stanley – whose day job is senior vice president for operations and technology at the Houston Chronicle – actually escaped the audience here at the 1999 NAA Newspaper Operations SuperConference with only one question, and it was a relatively benign question at that. (The SuperConference will be covered in detail in the February issue of our companion newsletter, The Cole Papers.)

There are two ways to interpret the 250-member audience's stillness: First, everyone was so stupefied by the technical argot that they couldn't think fast enough to react; or second, that everyone fully understood the ramifications and didn't need to question any aspect. We'd like to think that it was the latter.

The task force held its first meeting in conjunction with NEXPO ’98, held here in June. It is astonishing that in a mere seven months, the group hammered out a way for advertisers to send classifieds to newspapers and for newspapers to send classifieds to other sources (including on-line aggregation services).

It took the newspaper business more than 10 years (pretty much the entire ’70s) to agree upon and implement Standard Advertising Units; more recently, it took almost 18 months to create a set of guidelines (not a standard) for exchanging digital display advertising.

No, getting the classified exchange standard out within a few months is an achievement worthy of applause.

Undoubtedly, many newspaper publishers were anxious to get a quick resolution to this problem because there was a lot of effort needlessly being expended trying to solve this on a case-by-case basis. How, exactly, did a paper tell an on-line aggregator that an ad had been killed? What if the paper participated with two companies – did it kill ads one way with one and another way with the other?

But history has shown that even with a compelling rationale, our business can change as slowly as an alligator crosses a mid-Florida road. As Senior Editor Pete Wetmore details inside, the transition for the technologists will be relatively painless; many front-end suppliers have solved the problem of formatting classifieds for non-print usage over the course of the last couple of years.

The pain is going to come at the ad order entry desk. Phone room personnel will be obliged to ask more questions, and many of those questions are ones the customer doesn't want to answer: