Mag shorts: Saving on ad handling; Global Brief resurgent; Segal leads leadership centre

The advent of ad portals, such as the SendMyAd digital portal offered by Magazines Canada, means shorter production cycles and a better relationship with clients, according to a Q & A from Publishing Executive with Kim Latreille, the production director of St. Joseph Media and Gary Garland, Magazines' Canada's executive director of advertising services. Garland says the new service save time and money for publishers.

There's less handling of ads, less troubleshooting. Aside from that, there's increased reliability. When ads come through the portal, they're ready to print. That means less liability for publishers who have to open up files and make fixes because they were improperly produced.

But I think the biggest advantage is that all of these things together help to reduce cycle time. You can get your production done quicker and the magazine out to consumers faster. That helps in addressing needs of advertising agencies, who want to be able to reach consumers faster than ever.

Latreille says the ad portal provides opportunities to automate the process of ad file handling.

For example, we use a file naming convention. So for all of our ads, because we have several magazines with multiple regions each, we're picking up little pieces of the job ticket that the advertiser pulls out—i.e., that they fill in. So those fields are pulled out and put into the naming of the file. So when it lands on our server, it's already named. There are a lot of shortcuts that it's provided us in our production department.

In the past, it was taking us about 15 to 20 minutes to process an ad once we were told the ad had been delivered. If that involved pulling it down from our FTP or printing and preflighting it, we were spending 20 minutes an ad. Now we're spending five minutes or less on an ad.

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The second issue of the quarterly world affairs magazine Global Brief is being unveiled at a launch party hosted by Glendon College, its new home, on Tuesday, November 3 at 4 p.m. at the BMO conference centre, 2275 Bayview Avenue, Toronto.

There will be special  remarks at the reception by Christopher Alexander,  former Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan  and former Deputy Special Representative of the  United Nations Secretary-General for Afghanistan. 

The future looked uncertain for Global Brief after its first issue until it was taken up by the Glendon School of Public and International Affairs. 

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Brian Segal, the president and CEO of Rogers Publishing, has been announced as chair of the Ted Rogers Leadership Centre at Ryerson University's Ted Rogers School of Management.  Segal, who was president of Ryerson from 1980 to 1988 before joining Rogers, will be piloting a program of teaching, leadership events and communication and scholarship and research.