The Los Angeles Times last month launched new data warehousing and analytic software from Sybase Inc.

The newspaper is using Sybase’s Industry Warehouse Studio for Media software to help preprint advertisers better target their messages to specific audiences, said Pervez Sikora, Los Angeles Times’ director of advertising technology.

It provides advertisers with information they can use as they determine the best methods to distribute their marketing message — through preprints, direct mail or door-to-door carrier.

Additionally, Times officials said the software would yield information that would give advertisers a wide range of campaign flexibility, from aiming preprint advertising at consumers on a sub-ZIP code level to targeting all of the 5 million homes within the Los Angeles designated market area.

The Sybase implementation is a logical outgrowth of the Times’ “aggressive launch into the preprint business,” Sikora said.

Once the Times decided to pursue the preprint market, “We needed to manage growth effectively and smartly,” Sikora said. Management needed a better understanding of its preprint advertising data, and “We knew we needed to formulate some sort of data mart and (Sybase) was pretty much it.”

The newspaper plans to extend Industry Warehouse Studio for Media to other advertising departments, including classified, retail and interactive.

Sikora said the Times likely would devote another six months to fine-tuning the application’s rollout and extend the software to other corporate operations such as financial reporting and competitive intelligence. “There’s really no phase two,” he said. “It’s a constant evolution.”