Hearst Using Wave2 Software for Property Site

Newspaper publishers across the world continue to implement Wave2 AdPortal systems in order to lower the cost of sales, turning to self-service advertising solutions in order to both streamline their operations and to increase ad revenues.

One of the latest US publishing groups to further expand its self-service capabilities is Hearst Newspapers. Hearst’s The Houston Chronicle has this year launched its second Wave2 site, which is primarily focused on real estate.

The Houston Ch ronicle has offered self-service advertising to real estate agents for over three years. The initial real estate system enabled agents to access the Houston Area Realtors MLS data to build single listing display ads to be published in The Houston Chronicle real estate section. The publisher began to experience the benefits of self-service advertising with a decrease in the cost of sales and an increase in ad revenue, but felt that the application supplied by another vendor was too difficult to manage and to cumbersome for agents to use.

Todd Neal, Vice President, Real Estate Advertising Hearst Newspapers, describes the objectives of the project and expectations for future enhancements: “Having launched Wave2's AdPortal for the small-business retail vertical, instaad.net, we approached Wave2 to help us replace our existing real estate site. At this time though, our vision had grown: not only did we want to replace our existing real estate self-service platform, we also wanted to launch other classified self-service applications like obituaries. With this vision in place, we felt it was important to provide new workflow features that would easily support a broad-range of advertisers, and also provide tighter integration with our Millennium Classified Advertising system.”

Branded as MyAgentAds.com, Todd and his team now see AdPortal as a flexible portal that can provide them with a platform to evolve the real estate business well into the future. MyAgentAds is much easier to use for the agents, far easier for Hearst to manage from template creation, ad package creation, user administration, ad processing, and adding new features. Wave2 added a “recommendation engine”, another new feature for AdPortal, which agents are presented with upon login. This “recommendation engine” offers up a few questions that, when answered, will help navigate them to the correct type of advert and advert package.

“We went live in June and have already adding some new features like a single login between the HAR system and AdPortal,” said Todd Neal. “Agents will be able to choose to advertise a listing or their real estate business directly from within the Houston HAR system. With links built into the MLS site that state “Advertise this listing in the Houston Chronicle” or “Advertise in the Houston Chronicle Realtor Directory”, agents can easily step into the selfservice application and process their ad. This significantly extends our position and exposure to agents, and further streamlines their workflow process.”

Prior to launch the publisher took the decision to move its Wave2 applications to a Wave2 hosted facility, allowing the business to reduce the cost of running the self-service applications and also leverage Wave2’s enterprise architecture to expand the real estate application to four other Hearst titles: San Francisco Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News, Albany Times-Union and Connecticut Post. All of the Hearst newspapers are now able to benefit from lower costs by sharing hosting, server, and software costs.