Full exhibition halls, interesting talks and a large international order – the first day at the IFRA Expo 2011 in Vienna came to a successful close for ppi Media, a subsidiary of manroland. As part of the restructuring and realignment of its print media, Media Norge AS commissioned the Hamburg-based software company to install its planning and production system PlanPag and classified pagination system AdPag.

Media Norge has set its sights high: to produce newspapers more cheaply and efficiently and yet make them more attractive to readers and ad customers, in order to be able to compete against news providers on the internet. “During the reorganization of our ad management workflow at Aftenposten, Bergens Tidende, Fædrelandsvennen and Stavanger Aftenblad, we made a conscious decision to combine high standards and functionality, so ppi Media was our first choice,” says Rune Nilsen, IT manager advertising systems.

Ad management with PlanPag and AdPag

Today, ad customers demand almost unlimited layout options in daily newspapers as well. And late deadlines are a must. With their advertising products, Norwegian publishers have repeatedly set globally acclaimed standards. Up to now, only very few software solutions were able to produce innovative advertising formats in a highly automated workflow as ppi Media’s digital production planning systems. Together with AdPag and solutions from third-party suppliers, PlanPag will streamline the planning, production, pagination and page assembly workflows of the newspapers published by Media Norge ASA from 2012. Explaining Media Norge’s decision in favor of PlanPag, Rune Nilsen said: “We were looking for a central solution for our ad value chain which coordinates and monitors the information flow and, at the same time, is so open and flexible that new modules can be added and old ones replaced any time.” In the new workflow, classified ads will already be paginated on the basis of booking data for the ad pages. The EPS data will be placed automatically after delivery. The ad deadline can be extended until just before printing starts.