Second Apollo Site Confirmed

IPA Systems Ltd in conjunction with Wave2 Media Solutions Limited - the company founded by Chris Hodges to produce a new generation of workflow and content management software - has announced the second beta test site for its Apollo software, which has been designed to automate the process of producing display advertisements.

The Leicester Mercury has become the second Northcliffe site to commit to the project, following a previous announcement regarding the Nottingham Evening Post. The newspaper publisher will be working with distributor IPA Systems and Wave2 to establish the potential for this new software product. The software was installed at the beginning of the year and operator training is currently taking place, with a view to going live with the software by mid-February.

Wave2's Apollo software is one element of a range of intelligent software products that has been developed to enable the automatic make-up of full pages and display advertisements.

Commenting on the purchase, Paul Woodward, Head of Business Systems at the Leicester Mercury, said, "We see a tremendous potential for the software in a number of areas of our business. The first task that we have set for Apollo is in our recruitment advertising section. Currently we selectively target certain customers with a view to "up-selling" them to take larger, more prominent advertisements. New ad layouts are generated manually in an effort to sell the proposition, but this is a time consuming task. However, we actually achieve a worthwhile increase in revenues from this activity.

"With some 2,000 or so recruitment ads each week, we see Apollo offering us much more potential in this area. By automatically generating half-a-dozen alternative layouts we can present options quickly and easily to many more customers than we are able to with a manual system. The potential for additional revenue from this is quite significant."

If the recruitment sector trial is successful, Leicester Mercury will then look to equip the field sales team with the product. "We see another significant area of opportunity for Apollo with our field-based sales team," said Paul Woodward. "Often the customer has sketched something out on a PC, or just handwritten some basic copy. The sales rep equipped with Apollo can immediately advance the sales opportunity by offering the customer a number of visual options for his advert - taking the basic words and spaces and automatically making this up into professionally designed layouts."

Paul first saw Apollo in action at IFRA 2004 in October. "It was the simplicity of the product that impressed me most," he said. "Whilst I know there are a lot of complex workings going on inside the system, the actual user interface keeps things simple and straightforward."

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:

Apollo provides for an exceptionally powerful automated creative system which is particularly suited for the automatic production of display advertisements, signage and marketing materials. This software is appropriate for online ad creation, local creation of professional collateral or as an in-house automation tool.

Zeus is a unique personalised publishing solution for the creation of custom inserts, newspapers, journals etc. The system is capable of producing both electronic and print output.

Artemis is a dedicated automated newspaper layout system for the creation of editorial pages and complex listings pages. The system is capable of producing both electronic and print output.

The software concept behind all three software packages is defined by Chris Hodges as, "The second wave of content management."

He goes on to explain, "Similar solutions are available for web-based environments, but the unique feature of Wave2 products is that they will be able to intelligently paginate raw text into a pre-defined print format. The business rules which help to define all of this activity can also mix advertising and editorial content in an intelligent way."

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

TOP