5 fifteen Inc., of New York, NY, announced today that The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc. (RDA) has gone live and completed the first invoice cycle for digital bookings on its ad DEPOT advertising system. This completes the initial phase of a project, announced in March, to provide a cloud-based advertising booking and billing solution for all RDA’s North American Digital operations.

ad DEPOT is helping RDA to maximise advertising revenues by leveraging an integrated sales process for digital advertising, as well as providing the framework for a centralised ‘hub’ of management information. Created specifically for the magazine industry, ad DEPOT allows advert booking, placing, chasing and contact management to take place from one system of inter-connected components.

In addition to the flagship Reader’s Digest magazine, RDA publishes a suite of category-leading print and digital titles, including Taste of Home the nation’s largest food and entertaining magazine, and The Family Handyman.

The search for a robust ad billing system began two years ago, when RDA expanded its digital presence and billing requirements and decided to realise its desire for a cloud computing strategy across all its business and customer systems. The project kicked off in January of this year and the RDA and 5 fifteen teams worked together to get to this milestone in only four months.

“With our range of titles and online options for advertisers, we now have a system that provides us with the flexibility to support all of our current and future advertising requirements,” states John Herzog, Reader’s Digest Senior Director – IT North America – Digital/Ad Sales, “ad DEPOT is integrated with our Salesforce environment, our digital ad serving platform and it receives bank information for payments. It gives us the depth of functionality that large metro publications, such as ours, need.”

ad DEPOT is built using 100 percent web-services which can run anywhere; delivered directly from the Windows Azure cloud platform the solution for RDA provides high availability, scalable and durable cloud storage without the need to focus on infrastructure. 

Paul McKinley, 5 fifteen General Manager, comments, “We knew that we could deliver a magazine advertising system to RDA quickly and effectively.  ad DEPOT is a cloud-based, agile and expandable global solution, able to adapt to constantly changing business models. RDA now has full visibility across all advertising functions for all its titles, while experiencing the quality, speed and accuracy that our customers expect from us.”

Phase two of the project will begin immediately.