The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Advertisers asked to adopt colour standard

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Dec 01, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Advertisers asked to adopt colour standard

Staff Reporter

Tipped to reduce prepress costs

CHENNAI: One of the biggest problems from newspaper advertisers is the difference between their artwork and the manner in which it is reproduced in newsprint. The reasons for such a situation are plenty.

Now, in a bid to prevent such occurrences, international newspaper consulting firm Ifra has come up with a solution to set up a common standard for colour reproduction and printing processes across newspapers in the country. Apart from ensuring uniform reproduction of advertisements in the newspaper, following the standard is also tipped to reduce the prepress costs for advertisement agencies.

On Tuesday, the Advertising Club Madras in association with The Hindu introduced "Indian Coldset Offset Newspaper Standardisation" (ICONS) to representatives of several advertisement agencies at a meeting held at the Hotel Savera.

Ifra's executive director K.Z. Magdoom Mohamed introduced the concept and outlined the various advantages of adopting a colour standard, the gains of which are equally important for newspapers as well as advertisers. Already nine national newspapers, including The Hindu, have taken part in the ICONS initiative. Mr. Magdoom said the standard would enhance the quality of advertisements and make it predictable for the advertisers. It would also help considerably reduce costs.

"We recently carried a picture in all the participating newspapers to study the results and were surprised to see the reproduction quality more or less similar," he added.

The Hindu's director K. Balaji said it was a remarkable achievement that nine major newspapers in the country had already adopted the standard. "All the participating newspapers have been able to streamline production by following the standard," he said adding that much more needed to be done. "Using a common profile is just one element of advertising."

Representatives from The Hindu's advertisement department explained the audience how even seemingly small errors like leaving out the fonts while submitting the data to the newspaper office could lead to grave errors in newsprint. They suggested that advertisement agencies could run some quality checks to ensure that their advertisements were reproduced in the manner they were meant to be.

Following the ICONS standard could be one of the quality checks.

For details on the standard, log on to www.ifra.com. Call the representatives by phone (044-5211 2893 or 044-5211 2551).

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