Newspaper & Mailroom

NATIONAL PRESS UNITE TO CENTRALISE AD SPECIFICATIONS ON SPECLE

Tuesday 13. October 2009 - Major national UK newspaper publishing groups sign up to new central online database for advertising technical specifications

The UK’s National newspaper groups have come together to sign up to a new advertising specification database and industry resource, www.specle.net
, which is set to transform the way publishers manage, validate, and communicate advertising specifications – driving significant cost out of the ad production process.

Guardian News and Media, Telegraph Media Group Ltd, Financial Times, Trinity Mirror, Associated Newspapers, Independent News & Media UK Ltd and Evening Standard Ltd will include ad specifications for all their titles on www.specle.net
. Additionally, Guardian News and Media and Trinity Mirror have agreed to come on board on an exclusive basis, transferring all their respective advertising technical specifications onto www.specle.net
. This will make Specle the only place advertisers will now find the ad specifications online for these newspapers.

www.specle.net
, which is due to be officially launched in the UK in November 2009, is the new, highly efficient way for publishers to present ad specifications online and for advertisers to access them. It gives publishers the ability to easily and graphically display technical requirements so creative agencies and advertisers can quickly select and validate magazine or newspaper ad sizes and other technical information in real-time from a central online portal.

Says Tom Beckenham, managing director, Specle Ltd: “With Specle, publishers can now clearly communicate information that was previously complex to explain, and near impossible keep up-to-date. Publishers can now send links to their current information out to the whole advertising supply chain via their own unique, branded URL at www.specle.net
. We are delighted to have the support of the national press. To have the major newspaper groups in the country already live on the site is a huge endorsement of the strength of the system.

“We launched www.specle.net
in Benelux in August 2009 and now have over 95 percent of publishers online in this region. We are currently in talks with other major UK publishing houses and hope to have the overwhelming majority of UK publishers online by early next year. Over the next few months we will also be rolling out the system across Europe, so we expect to be making further exciting announcements as the roll out progresses. Our aim is to make www.specle.net
the international de-facto standard for the online sourcing of ad technical specifications for printed newspapers and magazines,” concludes Beckenham.
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