Working with Newspapers: A Success Story
Back in 2007, when the publisher of a daily newspaper owned by a large publishing company considered outsourcing ad production, the idea was greeted with surprise.
At the time, much of the newspaper industry was talking about and testing outsourcing. The publisher sent an employee to another newspaper's office to learn about their outsourcing project--and that other newspaper was (and still is) an Affinity Express client.
The employee recognized the benefits of outsourcing and recommended moving forward with Affinity Express. So the newspaper became the first property from that publishing company to move forward with outsourced ad production.
Outsourcing gave the client an opportunity to eliminate unproductive staff. They were amazed at how much more efficient they became. The client went live with outsourced production in late November 2008 and, after several weeks of long hours working on the transition, Affinity Express was performing well by the first week of 2009.
During the first 18 months of the project, there were daily conference calls with the offshore managers at Affinity Express. Eventually these daily calls tapered down to weekly, then monthly and have since been discontinued. Currently the client's internal staff and the Affinity Express team communicate most often via Skype chats, getting quick answers to their questions and working as an integrated team.
The client retained five associates to handle all special sections, magazines, specs, posters, sales flyers—in other words, any local/internal design requirements related to the marketing and advertising department at the paper. These resources also perform layout and pagination of the paper and manage the ad queues with Affinity Express.
One reason for this project's success was that the senior management support of the project set the tone for all levels within the organization to support the outsourcing initiative. The client also attributes some of the success to the detailed training and feedback our team provided.
According to the client's director of advertising:
I consider the offshore resources a true extension of my team and the goal is to outsource as much volume to Affinity Express as possible.
