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From current affairs to fashion, technology to fitness, a magazine focuses on the reader’s interests and communicates in a way that both informs and entertains. For practically every human interest there is a magazine providing unique insights into every facet of 21st century living. The diversity and character of the magazine industry is reflected in the all-encompassing design of Maxim Advertising.
Advertisers and their agencies demand a measurable return on their advertising, challenging publishers to provide quantifiable evidence that their campaigns are successful. Publishers are required to gather, maintain, manage, target and distribute vast amounts of additional information - Maxim Advertising delivers effective management of these complex elements.
Maxim Advertising provides ad salespeople with effective tools to price, book, schedule and process advertisements. The system integrates and streamlines all aspects of the advertising sales, production and management processes: pro-active contact management, order processing, contract management, scheduling, planning, pricing, composition, copy chasing, stationery requirements, reporting and invoicing. Maxim Advertising also efficiently manages full account information for all customers, automatically updates contracts, and keeps a complete record of all correspondence.
System Components:
Maxim is series of components designed to allow magazine publishers to maximise advertising revenues, process sales orders more efficiently and plan publications more effectively. Maxim comprises a number of key components that may be used across multiple departments within a publishing operation, all designed from a sales perspective ensuring that cross selling opportunities are maximised.
Some of the components to be found in Maxim include:
The system utilises the Oracle relational database to hold all relevant data to facilitate “data mining” thus providing a powerful marketing tool. This enables the customer to develop their existing product portfolio and also take advantage of both printed and electronic media opportunities.
Contact Management
Maxim’s contact database holds the links between products, client companies and agencies. Designed to look familiar for anyone used to using Microsoft Outlook, the  Contact Management component handles all sales diary and customer callback functions. Regional, notes and press information can be gathered for companies and contacts and the database can be populated and updated from third party sources.
Lists of clients/agencies and contacts can be extracted, based on sets of popular search criteria. The selections are run on the basis of region, contact and product group along with market and job function. The retrieved lists of companies or contacts can then be merged with user-defined templates within Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel for further analysis.
Advertising Order Processing
The orders component handles display, classified and regional advertising. This module works in tandem with the sales planner and updates staff with available selling space.
Advertising orders can be positioned automatically on an issue plan directly within orders. Each order can have a set of attributes as to favoured position of the client and these are then used by Maxim to allocate space for the order. Orders can also be placed onto the unallocated palette within the sales planner and left for the production department to place.
Both client and agency bookings are handled within Maxim with credit checks being performed on the payer’s sales account. A rate card can be set up for all positions.
Invoice, pre paid and proforma bookings can be handled and agencies, series and ad hoc discounts can be applied to the order, being charged to a third party if required.
Sales Planner
The sales planner is a multi-user, real time, graphical page allocation tool for planning and managing the selling and production of advertising space within multiple issues of magazines. This uses a common space server that is updated in real time with any amendments to orders, copy and layouts from other Maxim modules. The space server ensures that any amendments to issue plans are relayed to users currently viewing that issue.
 The sales planner can be run in three different modes. In advert planning mode adverts can be dragged and positioned on and off the issue plan. In editorial mode areas can be assigned to manage editorial copy allocation and production. In copy chasing mode the colours on the plan change to represent the status of the copy e.g. copy received, sent to reproduction.
Copy Chasing (Traffic Management)
The Copy Chasing diary identifies the production details for each issue. New copy can be set for an order including headline, coupon and copy contact details. Repeat copy can be retrieved and assigned to the order via the use of the existing copy search facility.
Copy can be tracked through a set of user-defined statuses that are visible against the order in the copy-chasing mode of the sales planner. Tasks can be allocated to the chasing process, which could include the automatic production of follow up letters using standard content templates integrated into Microsoft Word.
Invoice Manager
Maxim’s own invoice manager can be used to produce and manage invoices and credits for orders and extra charges.
Deduplication
The Maxim database is a central repository for all information, enabling multiple users running multiple publications to access and use the same information. Typically this information would contain business names & addresses, credit control information, customer queries, advertising history etc. The Maxim deduplication component ensures that vital contact information is stored centrally only once, and it keeps the data clean by preventing the addition of duplicate names and addresses.
Users benefit in many ways. For example, information need only be maintained in one central place thereby avoiding the movement of data between applications, which inevitably leads to inaccuracies – “maintain once – use by many”.
Contracts Management
This covers the creation, maintenance and fulfilment of advertising contracts. Templates can be created for frequently used contracts or special offers, and the contract parameters can filter the booking options for advertising orders booked against contracts. Fulfilment criteria can be specified on volume, pages and revenue, and the system can individually track the fulfilment of each contract. Finally, invoices and credits can be raised at the end of the contract, dependent on the contract having been over or under fulfilled.
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