German Agency Delivers All Newspaper Ads Digitally

Leo Burnett Deutschland has hit a digital advertisement milestone following the adoption of Quickcut's digital production workflow to streamline its advertising creation, validation and delivery.

Leo Burnett Deutschland has hit a digital advertisement milestone following the adoption of Quickcut's digital production workflow to streamline its advertising creation, validation and delivery.

The agency now supplies 100 per cent of newspaper advertisements and 90 per cent of magazine advertisements digitally and individually customised to each publication's production specifications using Quickcut.

Quickcut's approach to digital advertising production uses each publication's exact production specifications, including colour profiles, to guide and manage advertising materials from the point of creation, through validation to the point of print delivery.

That approach ensures printed results will match what the client expected and the publisher requires, with significant process efficiencies, claimed the company.

Quickcut said that the majority of daily newspapers in Germany now receiving publication-specific validated advertisements via its service.

Leo Burnett Deutschland has joined international advertising agencies in urging magazine publishers to go on-line to receive validated, colour managed and secure files from them.

As a result Germany's top magazine publishing groups, including Gruner and Jahr, Bauer, Axel Springer and Burda, have already adopted Quickcut, which enables Leo Burnett to provide digital advertising copy for campaigns for companies such as Philip Morris and Fiat.

Jan Hause, head of technical services at Leo Burnett, said: "Quickcut gives us a huge advantage because it enables us to create and validate our ads against individual newspaper and magazine specifications and submit them to an increasing number of publishers in total security and in full confidence that they will reproduce to the highest standards and without any errors.

As with all brand advertising, it is vitally important that the visual image and the colours are identical across the range of publications, in which it appears.

This means that each publication needs to receive the PDFs in a format that meets their printing specifications exactly but also ensures the advert is still the way the agency intended.

And Quickcut does precisely that." Hause has been enthusiastic about Quickcut ever since the Frankfurt-based agency began its intensive use for validation and delivery of advertisements.

His responsibility is to ensure that the adverts designed by the creative team are ready for print and sent as PDFs to the publishers to their exact specifications.

He wants all magazine publishers to follow the lead of Germany's daily newspaper publishers.

He explained that before Quickcut, every newspaper and magazine would provide advertising agencies with their advertising specifications but that information was often not kept up to date.

Consequently, publications often received copy in a size and format that did not meet their requirements.

Using Quickcut's central on-line database of constantly updated production specifications, that insecurity and inefficiency has disappeared.

Quickcut creates a direct link between the advertising agency producing the advertisement and the publisher.

The publisher's exact parameters for PDF creation and printing - from the distiller settings to the target colour space and even the selection of printing inks - are all stored in the Quickprint on-line database to which the agency refers to when creating an advertisement.

"That reduces the risk that the publisher will receive ads in the wrong format, with the wrong PDF settings, or in the wrong data format, to practically zero," said Hause.

Advertising agencies can send their advertisements to publications throughout Germany or to publications worldwide in a few minutes, in the knowledge that every publisher will receive the copy to their requirements.

A reporting function also allows tracking of the process of transmission in real time.

"It was very easy to convince our partners in publishing to use Quickcut.

A single presentation was sufficient to show the benefits and advantages of using it, which are an increase in efficiency and security of transmission.

The more users there are, the bigger the advantages for agencies and publishers," added Hause.

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