• by Joe Mandese , March 1, 2006

ORLANDO -- The magazine industry is beginning to test electronic advertising insertion orders, but still has a major obstacle to overcome--the inability to uniformly code individual magazine titles --before it can provide the kind of end-to-end transactional systems that the TV and radio industry have been building for Madison Avenue.

"What we need is an industry database for print, because without it, we can't input the invoices," Michael Donovan, chairman-CEO of Donovan Data Systems, told a standing-room-only crowd Wednesday during a preliminary session of the American Association of Advertising Agencies' Media Conference and Trade Show here.

Donovan, whose company processes most of the media buys for the majority of the ad industry, said that unlike TV and radio broadcasters, publishers have no "national registry" to identify and code individual magazines.

"We have it for TV and radio. It's the station call letters," Donovan said, referring to the unique call letters the Federal Communications Commission assigns to licensed TV and radio stations.

Donovan said DDS has already begun testing electronic insertion orders with consumer magazine giant Time Inc., but said the company could not go to the next step of providing electronic feedback from publishers to media buyers without a national print media registry.