Interview with Don Oldham_DTI

newspaper techniques: What solutions does your company offer to support media houses in cross-media ad-taking/selling, management and production?

Don Oldham: DTI adopted a whole new kind of database to serve as the foundation of our cross-media content management system; Caché from Intersystems. It is better for the new data types like audio, video, flash, etc. Our booking software allows not just the booking of ads for any type of media, but more importantly supports “package buys”, which combine ads for different media into a complementary purchase or campaign. We enable sales reps to book ads remotely, enable customer self-service for uploading and tracking ads, and support output to print and also web sites and streaming servers.

What we do not have yet, but consider very vital is the ability to place online ads which are relevant to each reader’s or viewer’s profile. Only relevant ads will generate the increase in revenue that media houses are looking for. What we are working on is to help newspapers know who their readers are, so they can serve the relevant ads.


nt: What are the requirements from today's users (media houses)?

D. Oldham: Media houses have a large variety of requirements to implement a constant new stream of ideas for generating revenue online. And there is an explosion of small suppliers with interesting concepts. DTI believes it can serve an important role with our Liquid Media architecture to allow lots of applications from different suppliers to be integrated and managed into a comprehensive content management architecture. I don’t think anyone can foresee what all the requirements are going to be. So it is important for media houses to have a foundation that can cope with ongoing changing requirements and still manage everything.


nt: Are publishers tending to buy all-encompassing solutions, or various systems?

D. Oldham: The trend in print is to standardize on solutions, even across groups, to get the best cost savings. But online, the trend is to buy every idea with a real promise of more revenue, to enter into alliances with anyone who can broaden the reach and generate revenue, to develop new ideas inhouse, etc. There seems to not be an all-encompassing solution available. DTI would like to be a web-publishing foundation and provide major component parts of the online solution, but necessarily tie solutions together from many other suppliers, and even make more alliances possible with our Liquid Media data flow.

Page first published: 14.03.2007