Additions to Integration-X’s Adpoint X1 are bringing AI to advertisement design, while the technology is being applied to a complementary platform for automated planning and pagination of newspapers and magazines.
The company says a “massive wave” of publishers have been ditching legacy print planning systems in favour of its Planpoint X1 product, the latest among them being Denmark’s JP/Politikens Hus.
Using generative AI with data already stored in its Adpoint X1 product has enabled Integration to develop a solution that delivers high-quality creatives in seconds with little prompting. The company says multiformat creatives are created in seconds by referencing existing creatives and providing a wide range of templates. Inline editing tools ensure minor touch-ups are applied across multiple creatives without additional prompting.
With a commitment to deliver print creatives shortly, a new AI Ad Design module currently creates digital campaigns with multiple creatives. Features include automated creative chasing, an advertiser portal for creative delivery and proofing, instant “brand safety” and compliance feedback, hands-free creative delivery to your ad server, AI-based creative production at scale, and quality control of all ad types and formats.
The JP/Politikens Hus project was part of a commitment to ensuring their printing technology would mirror the publisher’s digital evolution, transforming print planning into an integrated, consolidated component of a modern, digital-centric infrastructure. Having worked with the developer across two decades, and with Adpoint in use for print and digital creative management, the transition to Planpoint X1 was seen as a logical progression.
Digital development and technology project manager Søren Etlar Frederiksen said the aim had been to find solutions that “in essence should solve the same core tasks as they had been doing with print for decades, but in an automated, consolidated and fully integrated way.
“Planpoint X1 provides us with tools to quickly and easily track page production and to handle last-minute changes,” he said.
There are obvious synergies from it running on the same platform as Adpoint, with a single solution for ad material handling and planning, serviced by a single vendor. “The flexibility of a ‘planning as a service’ model allowed us to simplify our tech stack while maintaining existing and well-proven integrations.
“It was a good step in the right direction, allowing us to improve internal consolidation while not having to change other moving parts in our workflow.”
Planpoint X1 is a cloud-based platform for automated planning and pagination of newspapers and magazines, while Adpoint X1 – fully integrated with the order management and editorial or content management systems – offers rule-based planning designed to minimise or even eliminate the need for manual ad placement.
After an exhaustive testing phase to ensure automation features were delivering promised time-savings and that the flexibility of downstream integration to the editorial solution “proved strong and flexible”, the implementation took only 14 weeks from start to first publication . The rollout was executed in stages with the Ekstra Bladet masthead going live in December last year, quickly followed by Politiken, Jylland-Posten and seven regional weekly titles.
Beyond replacing legacy tech, the shift has introduced automation to the publisher’s workflow, resulting in what Frederiksen describes as a “reasonable ROI”.
Implementation of a “strong and standardised, yet flexible, solution” has also allowed JP/Politikens Hus to benefit from the experience of some major publishers in Europe and beyond. At the same time, they work with the vendor to specify and test new features have broad interest for all users. An example is a new feature for inventory check as well as a supplementary design for a plan overview, which will be implemented “in the near future,” he says.