Pressure from direct bookers is growing

 
PrintOnline The digital data courier is once again able to reduce its prices slightly, although the trend towards direct booking discounts is causing additional work.The advertising volume in the press continued to increase last year. Although the December figures are still missing from the VSW advertising statistics, the print sector recorded growth rates of between 1.7 percent (regional weekly press III) and 20.5 percent (business press) up to November, depending on the title group. Only two press categories suffered a (slight) decline in total volume, and the digital data courier PrintOnline (POL) also felt the upturn. This hub between advertisers and agencies on the one hand and publishers on the other was able to increase its transmission performance again in 2007 - by around 5121 advertisements or 4 percent to a total of 130,962 advertisements. The proportion of small advertisements (less than 311 square centimeters) was around 58 percent. Last year, over 1000 customers sent advertisements via POL.
POL was founded in 1997 by Publicitas, Tamedia, Ringier and NZZ, each of which holds a 25 percent stake in the "Network for Print Data". The main aim of the non-profit company is to make the handling of print advertising easier for advertising clients. The Datenkurier is therefore not financed by the customers, but by all the publishers who are supplied with advertisements via POL. However, POL passes on its surpluses to the publishers in the form of rate reductions. Since POL was founded ten years ago, the non-profit company has been able to reduce its fees several times - most recently a year ago.
POL Managing Director Kurt Obrist has now also announced a gentle price reduction for the new year: POL will waive the fee of one franc per transmitted megabyte in future. The elimination of this fee will be partially compensated by an increase in the rate per advertisement. Large publishers who pay an annual connection fee of CHF 15,000 will now be charged CHF 11 instead of CHF 10 per advertisement. Smaller publishers who waive the affiliation fee will now pay CHF 31 instead of CHF 30 per advertisement. If the advertisements are smaller than 311 square centimetres (half a tabloid page), large publishers will now pay CHF 7 (previously CHF 6) and small publishers CHF 19 (previously CHF 18). Overall, publishers will still have to pay 3.5 percent less for POL services in the new year, says Obrist.
A trend of recent years was also confirmed in 2007: although classified ads continued to rise, POL was only able to benefit from this to a limited extent. The reason: they are increasingly being placed via Publiconnect, Scout24, Unio or Prospective, the specialized providers for online and print classifieds markets - bypassing POL.
POL is also feeling the effects of the trend among publishers to increasingly free themselves from dependency on P, go it alone and grant a direct booking fee (DBE). The latter is intended to serve as an incentive for agencies to book directly with publishers instead of via the P. But this has its pitfalls. But this has its pitfalls. "No self-directed publisher has direct interfaces to POL, only the P does," says Obrist. This means that it is technically easier for clients to book self-published titles via P than if they do it directly. This is because P's own booking system contains all of the publishers' data - publication dates, regional holidays, colors, size - information that a direct booking customer must first enter. "This leads to communication problems and duplicate orders more often than before," says Obrist. He doesn't want to dramatize the situation. "But we do have to make a lot more additional clarifications these days."
Nevertheless, POL does not envisage any rate increases for publishers with DBE. The solution is more likely to be new software - one with a standardized interface for data exchange. "Both P and POL are working on this," says Obrist. The first test installations are in operation. In future, it should therefore no longer matter whether a title is owned or leased by P - and whether it grants a DBE.    
Markus Knöpfli