| Over several years, Benjamin S. Waldie, now president of Automated Workflows, LLC, worked very closely with various departments at TV Guide to automate many time consuming tasks. The following are some examples of the types of things that Waldie was able to automate.
Advertising Production Scanning
An AppleScript-based solution was developed for use by scanning operators in TV Guide's Ad Production department. This solution was developed to automatically apply LZW compression to ad graphics, as they were scanned. By compressing the graphics in this manner, TV Guide was able to save valuable time during ad processing in other workflows, in addition to reducing server storage capacity requirements.
Ad Customization
One of the advertising groups at TV Guide is Ad Customization. This group customizes the time and channel information in the national ads of TV Guide’s advertisers. In other words, rather than have an advertiser send in 250 specific pieces of copy, one for each unique edition of the magazine, advertisers can send in one. The Ad Customization team puts the time and channel information into the ads for each edition.
During a busy week, TV Guide can have in excess of 65 customizable ads in 250 editions. That’s over 16,000 customizable ads in one week!
Once a customized ad is complete, it needs to be proofed. Previously, customized ads were sent to a laser printer to be printed for proofing. Today, an AppleScript application makes these files into PDFs for on-screen proofing. Use of AppleScript in this area allows ads to be proofed much faster, since sending 16,000 ads to a laser printer tends to be pretty time consuming. The script can convert files to PDF much faster than they can be printed, and they can be immediately pulled up on anyone’s machine, regardless of platform, for proofing. Also, Ad customization can now archive all of its customized ads on disk for future reference. This was previously done with filing cabinets, and due to space limitations, the department could only store a few weeks of ads at a time.
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A Close Up of a
Customizeable Ad Field
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On screen proofing allowed TV Guide to save a large amount of money on printer supplies. For example, in 1999 alone, TV Guide saved at least $5,000 on printer supplies and repairs in just this one area of Advertising Production. In addition, with up to 16,000 prints per week, this process saved a large amount of money on paper and toner supplies.
Ad Cropping
The ad cropping area of Ad Production also uses AppleScript to proof its ads. Once an ad is cropped to the correct size, it is dropped into a watched folder, where it is picked up by an AppleScript application, renamed, and printed on a high resolution laser printer. AppleScript allows TV Guide to save around $1,000 per week on these proofs, which were previously sent to the Prepress department for output. This was also a very time consuming process. Now, the department gets the ads instantly from the Ad Production printer once they are cropped.
Ad Creation
AppleScript is also used to create ads for some of TV Guide’s cable advertisers. The process of building these ads used to take an operator about 3 days to complete manually. Now, using AppleScript, the entire process takes no more than a few hours. An operator now creates these ads by choosing graphics from pop-up menus and entering text into specified fields. Next, AppleScript merges the text and graphics with the correct templates, creates the ads, prints them, and makes them into PDFs for further processing.
ISDN Error Maintenance
Every 10 hours, a script sends a file to itself through the TV Guide Ad Production ISDN line. If the script does not receive the file back within a certain amount of time, it knows that there is a problem with the line. The script will then send an email to a list of people to notify them of the problem. This allows Ad Production to verify that the ISDN line is working properly without having to manually monitor the line.
Other Solutions
Click here to read an article from "Publishing & Production Executive" magazine, published in the June 2000 issue. This article talks about Benjamin S. Waldie's use of automation for preflighting at TV Guide.
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