Peter Marsh, chief technology officer for Atex, talks about the vendor’s position in the competitive newspaper market and how Atex is positioned to compete and to help newspapers thrive.

Atex has said its Digital News and Advertising (DNA) initiative is in sync with future newspaper trends. What value do you see in integrating news and advertising, and how does Atex plan to make this happen?

A newspaper’s brand is its greatest asset. Readers find newspapers to be credible, trustworthy and relevant sources of information. In addition, advertisers trust that their ads will appear alongside respectable news content. Newspapers around the world are building upon this foundation as a means of differentiating their brands from other online and offline competitors.

Atex DNA is designed to help newspapers and other media companies in their quest to make content more valuable by linking news and advertising in ways that are increasingly more personalized, collaborative, and available on demand. Atex is accomplishing this through integrated Web and print content management solutions, contextual search technology, personalization and a complete advertising marketplace portal that supports print, preprint, online, banner, mobile and video ad content.

How can newspapers best monetize the opportunities provided by the constantly emerging mobile and broadcast channels?

Increasingly, newspapers are realizing that customers are interested in much more than news from their traditional products. Although newspapers have these deep customer relationships and local community connections, the challenge is to put it all into a monetizable form.

At Atex, we believe the key is to build searchable, structured databases of news and advertising content that can be accessed by customers when, how and via whatever channels they choose. If the content is well structured, categorized, and enriched through tagging and metadata, newspapers will be able to create business models around delivering this content to mobile, broadcast or other channels.

GPS technology is another example of how newspapers will be able to provide a specific service depending on the consumer’s preference and location — at that very moment. With Atex DNA, a newspaper will be able to provide such services for geo-tagged news, information and advertising content.

Hosted applications and managed services are gaining traction for newspapers. Why is this becoming an important method of cost savings, and will it also be effective in helping newspapers to go green?

To stay competitive in the digital arena, newspaper companies need to invest and innovate their business strategy and processes. A move to managed services helps to reduce operational costs by optimizing resource allocation. In addition, hosted models turn capital investments into operational expenses, thus releasing financial resources to sustain future growth in digital businesses.

We are working with our customers around the world to help deploy (or in some cases redeploy) our systems under a managed services model. We are committed to helping our customers reduce their carbon footprint, and under a hosted solution, Atex is assisting newspapers in their efforts to significantly cut down on electricity, fuel, power and air conditioning costs.

What tools can Atex offer to empower newspapers with more customer-focused sales forces?

As a main sponsor of the WAN Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project, Atex is keenly aware of the investment analysts’ recommendations that newspapers around the world need to provide tools for “better trained, more aggressive and more customer- focused advertising sales forces.” We have taken this recommendation to heart, and our Atex Mactive advertising solutions now include technologies for more effective field sales, CRM, ad verification, e-commerce, reporting and analytics.

The Atex Advertising Marketplace also helps to create more comprehensive media buys, encompassing print, online, mobile and broadcast ad placements in a single order. Upcoming versions will provide greater support for online ad inventory and yield management, as well as greater statistical and analytical information to help salespeople and advertisers accurately measure the success of each ad campaign.